RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Boston, typically shipping a production MVP in 6–12 weeks for a fixed $13,000–$25,000. That is a fraction of the cost of hiring an in-house team in Greater Boston (roughly $430,000 a year for two engineers) or commissioning a Boston agency ($120,000–$450,000 per build). One team ships the iOS app, the Android app, and the web app on shared infrastructure, and the founder owns all of the code.
One team for your iOS, Android, and web build. We help Greater Boston founders go from a Figma or Lovable prototype to a production app that clears a security review — and holds up in front of investors.
Boston isn't a fast-fashion consumer-app town — it's where deep science becomes product. Massachusetts startups raised $16.7 billion in venture capital in 2025, a 12% jump year over year, and the region ranks as the #3 startup ecosystem in the country behind only the Bay Area and New York. But the money here flows differently: overwhelmingly into biotech, life sciences, healthcare, and enterprise software rather than social apps. That shapes what a build has to be. Your investors came out of MIT and Harvard labs and expect rigor; your first customers are often hospitals, pharma, universities, or enterprises whose procurement teams run a real security review before they'll sign. We build for that reality — the architecture that survives diligence, the compliance posture a health or biotech pilot demands, and the polish an ex-founder VC still expects to see.
MassChallenge (equity-free, founded in Boston in 2009) and Techstars Boston (the second-oldest program in the Techstars network, $120K for 6%, 200+ companies launched) run alongside The Engine, LabCentral, and Greentown Labs — North America's largest climate-tech facility. When you're in a cohort, you're building backward from a hard demo deadline, and we've shipped for teams on exactly that clock.
Greater Boston's venture dollars go overwhelmingly to biotech, life sciences, and deep tech — see AI-biotech Lila Sciences' $350M Series A in 2025. That means your product often lives next to a lab or a clinical workflow, and the bar isn't 'does it look good' but 'does it hold up under compliance and diligence.' We prioritize the flows that demo well and the foundations that survive scrutiny.
Massachusetts carries roughly 270,000 tech-sector jobs and one of the strongest tech labor markets in the country — but you're bidding for the same senior engineers as MIT spinouts, big pharma, and Kendall Square unicorns. A senior role takes 50–70 days to fill before anyone writes code. Bringing us in lets you ship your v1 now and hire deliberately later, from a position of traction.
With MIT, Harvard, BU, Northeastern, and 50+ colleges in the metro, Boston mints founders and technical talent faster than almost anywhere — and much of the best AI, robotics, and health-tech work starts inside a university lab. We're used to translating that research-grade prototype into a production app real users can trust.
Greater Boston by the numbers
Who we build for in Greater Boston
Patient-facing and clinical-trial apps for Boston's world-leading biotech corridor — built to clear compliance and pass a security review.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for the hospitals, payers, and health-tech startups that anchor the Longwood and Kendall Square scene.
Learning platforms and course apps for a metro with 50+ colleges and a deep bench of education-technology founders out of MIT and BU.
Payments, cross-border, and lending apps that need Stripe, real compliance, and security tight enough for Boston's finance and insurance base.
LLM-powered products with streaming UIs, vector search, and usage billing — the category leading Massachusetts AI-job demand right now.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for the enterprise-software startups that dominate the local funding mix.
RapidDev builds native and cross-platform mobile apps, Next.js web apps and dashboards, full MVP-to-scale product builds, and production AI features for Boston founders — mobile and web ship from one team on shared infrastructure, with the compliance posture biotech and health pilots require.
No stitching together an app shop and a web agency. We scope and ship your iOS, Android, and web product on shared infrastructure — so everything actually works together.
One codebase, both stores. We build React Native and Expo apps that pass App Store and Play Store review the first time, with the native feel your users expect.
Fast, SEO-ready web apps on Next.js. From investor-facing marketing sites to the logged-in product itself — dashboards, admin panels, and customer portals.
The whole thing, mobile and web, on shared infrastructure. Ideal when you're moving off a Lovable or Bubble prototype that's hit its ceiling and need production code that clears a pilot's security review.
Ship the AI feature your product actually needs — chat, search, or agents — wired to your data with streaming, evals, and cost controls, not a demo that falls over.
You see a working, deployed build every single week. Here's the exact path from a first call to a launched app — five steps, no surprises.
We map your idea (or your stuck prototype) to a concrete feature list, a fixed price, and a timeline. You leave with a plan whether or not you hire us.
What you get
A fixed price + timeline
Clickable Figma flows and a technical architecture you sign off on before a line of production code is written. No surprises later.
What you get
Clickable Figma + signed-off architecture
You get a working, deployed build every single week — not a black box. Test on real devices, give feedback, watch it take shape.
What you get
A deployed build every week
We handle App Store and Play Store submission, production deploy, and a full handover — code, docs, and access are yours to keep.
What you get
Live app + all code and access
Keep us on a retainer for new features and fixes, or take the wheel with your own team. Your call — we don't lock you in.
What you get
A retainer — or a clean exit
Production-grade, boring-in-the-best-way tools that your future in-house team can hire for and maintain. No lock-in, no proprietary magic.
Building a custom app in Boston costs anywhere from $13,000 with RapidDev to over $450,000 with a large agency, depending on who builds it. Here is the honest math on the four realistic paths — with real 2025–2026 Boston numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Boston
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Boston / US agency
typical price for a comparable custom build
Offshore / freelance
typical Eastern Europe / LatAm blended rate
RapidDev
fixed price, quoted before we start
| Path | Typical cost | Time to first shipped product |
|---|---|---|
| Hire a team in-house in Boston | ~$420K – $460K / yr | 3–5 months just to hire, then build |
| Boston / US agency | $120K – $450K+ | 4–9 months |
| Offshore / freelance | $25 – $50 / hr | Highly variable — often 2–3x quoted |
| RapidDev | $13K – $25K | 6–12 weeks to a live, submitted app |
The numbers behind this, sourced
For the price of two to three months of one Boston engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Boston with RapidDev costs a fixed $13,000–$25,000, quoted before any code is written rather than billed by the hour. A focused single-platform MVP starts at $13,000; a full mobile-plus-web product with payments and AI features runs up to $25,000.
You get a fixed price before we write a line of code — quoted, not billed by the hour. Every Boston build lands in the $13K–$25K range depending on scope.
Solo founders and pre-seed teams validating one core flow with real users.
Seed-stage startups shipping a fundable v1 to the App Store and the web.
Series A teams replacing a no-code MVP or adding serious AI features.
A few of the builds we've shipped for Boston founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Boston founder had a Lovable prototype for a patient-intake app but couldn't pass the security review a hospital pilot required to go live.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real RLS, added HIPAA-aware access controls, and shipped native iOS + Android — clearing the pilot's security checklist.
Challenge: A Kendall Square team's LLM tool for lab researchers worked in a demo but fell over under load and had no way to bill labs for usage.
What we shipped: We shipped a streaming chat UI, added vector search over their research corpus, and wired per-lab usage metering into Stripe before their Series A raise.
Challenge: A university-spinout learning platform had outgrown a Bubble MVP — every new feature broke two others and hiring engineers to work in it was impossible.
What we shipped: We migrated their data into a proper Postgres schema and rebuilt the product on Next.js with role-based access, so they could finally hire and scale.
190+ people across 17 countries, a 4.9 rating on Clutch, and 600+ apps shipped. Here's the leadership standing behind your build.
CEO & Founder
Founder of RapidDev, a global software firm whose team has delivered 1,000+ client projects. He helps founders cut through the hype and ship practical, production-grade software — fast.
Columbia University · Harvard Business School · U.S. Navy veteran · 1,000+ client projects
Matt on LinkedInCOO
Runs operations across RapidDev's 190+ person, 17-country team — the person making sure your build ships on time and on scope.
CTO
Owns the technical bar for every build: the architecture, code quality, and security review that has to survive investor and pilot diligence.
Dev Lead
Leads the engineers who ship your weekly builds across iOS, Android, and web on shared infrastructure.
Both — that's the whole point of working with us instead of stitching two vendors together. We build your mobile app (iOS and Android from one React Native codebase) and your web app on shared infrastructure, so your data, auth, and payments live in one place instead of three.
Yes, and it's one of the most common reasons Boston founders come to us. No-code prototypes are great for validation but hit a ceiling on security, scale, and hiring. We migrate your data into a real database and rebuild the product in production-grade code you own — usually without losing any of your existing data.
Most builds land between $13,000 and $25,000, quoted as a fixed price before we start — not billed by the hour. After a free 45-minute scope call we send a concrete feature list, price, and timeline. The band depends on scope: a focused single-platform MVP sits near the bottom, a full mobile + web product with payments and AI features toward the top.
Typically 6–12 weeks from kickoff to a live, submitted app. A focused MVP can ship in 4–6 weeks; a full mobile + web product with AI features runs closer to 9–12. You get a working, deployed build every week, so you're never waiting months to see progress.
Yes — that's a big reason Boston health and life-sciences founders work with us. We build on real infrastructure with row-level security, HIPAA-aware access controls, audit trails, and a documented architecture, so your app can survive the procurement and security review that hospitals, payers, and pharma partners run before a pilot goes live. We've cleared exactly that checklist for a patient-facing build.
No — we work with Greater Boston founders remotely and asynchronously. You'll have a dedicated point of contact, weekly demos, and a shared board. If you prefer a video kickoff or working sessions, we're happy to schedule around your timezone.
You do — completely. The code lives in your GitHub, the App Store and Play Store listings are under your accounts, and we hand over full documentation at launch. We never hold your product hostage, and you're free to bring the work in-house or hire your own team whenever you want.
That's a big part of what we do for seed and Series A teams here. Boston investors came out of MIT and Harvard labs and expect rigor — so we prioritize the flows that demo well, ship App-Store-quality polish, and make sure the architecture holds up to technical diligence. Many of our Boston clients raise on the version we ship.
Absolutely — most of the founders we work with are non-technical or first-time technical founders. We handle every technical decision, explain trade-offs in plain English, and give you a product you can maintain or hand to a future CTO. You focus on customers and fundraising; we handle the build.
It comes down to structure, not corners cut. We scope a fixed set of features up front, so there is no open-ended hourly meter. A small, senior-only team does the work directly — you are not paying for account managers, sales overhead, or junior engineers learning on your budget. And we reuse hardened production patterns for auth, payments, and infrastructure instead of rebuilding them from scratch each time. An in-house Boston team carries full salaries, benefits, and months of ramp-up before anything ships — while competing with MIT spinouts and big biotech for the same engineers; an agency layers overhead on top of the build. We simply do not carry those costs.
Every build includes a 30-day bug-fix window after launch — if something we shipped breaks, we fix it at no extra cost. Beyond that, you can keep us on an optional monthly support retainer for ongoing fixes and new features, or take the code in-house and maintain it yourself. You own the code either way, so you are never locked in.
Small adjustments within the agreed scope are just part of the weekly sprint — you review a working build every week and give feedback we fold in. If you want to add or swap something bigger that changes the scope, we handle it with a simple change order: we tell you the price and timeline impact before doing the work, you approve it, and only then do we build it. No surprise invoices, and no silent scope creep.
Grab a 45-minute slot with our team below. We'll map your idea — or your stuck Boston prototype — to a concrete feature list, a fixed $13K–$25K price, and a timeline. You walk away with a real plan either way.
Prefer email? Contact us instead.
We serve founders across Boston and Greater Boston — from first scope call to a launched, submitted app. Our Google Business Profile below is the quickest way to see us on the map, save us for later, or leave a review after we ship.
View our Boston profile on Google MapsRemote-friendly · Serving the greater Greater Boston area
Book a free 45-minute scope call. You'll walk away with a concrete feature list, a fixed price, and a timeline — whether or not you decide to work with us.
Serving Boston and Greater Boston · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
