RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Chicago, 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 Chicago (roughly $400,000 in true first-year cost for two engineers) or commissioning a Chicago agency ($120,000–$400,000 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 Chicago founders go from Figma or a Lovable prototype to a production app that holds up in front of enterprise buyers and Midwest investors alike.
Chicago is the discipline capital of American startups. Founders here raise less and build more: local companies routinely hit the same milestones on 40–50% less capital than their coastal peers, because the market rewards revenue over hype. That shapes what a launch has to be. Your first customers are logistics operators, insurers, hospital systems, and trading desks — buyers who run procurement reviews and expect integrations that actually work. Your investors, from Hyde Park Venture Partners to Chicago Ventures, underwrite unit economics, not vanity metrics. And the talent you'd hire — trained at UChicago, Northwestern, UIUC, and inside Grubhub, Tempus, and Relativity — is strong but slow and expensive to land. We build for that reality: the polish that survives a buyer demo, the architecture that survives a security review, and the speed that keeps you closing deals instead of burning runway.
1871, in the Merchandise Mart, is one of the most-ranked startup hubs in the world and the gravitational center of Chicago's founder community. Alongside it sit MATTER for health tech, REACH for proptech, and Techstars Chicago. Being inside that network means your peers are shipping real products for real Midwest buyers — and we've built for teams working exactly that room.
Chicago investors are famous for backing companies that get more done with less. Startups here reach the same milestones on roughly 40–50% less capital than coastal peers, which means every dollar of your build budget has to convert to shipped product. A fixed-price, no-waste build fits the way the whole ecosystem thinks about money.
Logistics, insurance, trading, and healthcare aren't side markets in Chicago — they're the core. That means your v1 usually has to clear a procurement or security review and integrate with legacy systems on day one. We prioritize the real integrations and the diligence-ready architecture those buyers demand, not just a pretty demo.
The metro has 150,000+ tech workers and a pipeline from UChicago, Northwestern, and UIUC — but a senior engineering role still 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 rather than urgency.
Chicagoland by the numbers
Who we build for in Chicagoland
Freight, fleet, and warehouse apps for the country's rail and trucking hub — real-time tracking, routing, and integrations with legacy TMS systems.
Payments, lending, and trading tools built for a city home to the CME and CBOE — Stripe, real compliance, and rock-solid security from day one.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for Chicago's deep MATTER-anchored health ecosystem, from clinical tools to senior-care platforms.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for the vertical SaaS and insurtech startups that define the Chicago pipeline.
Two-sided platforms with payments, matching, and ratings — the model that built Grubhub, Cameo, and a generation of Chicago consumer apps.
Leasing, property-management, and construction-tech apps for a metro whose REACH accelerator made it a proptech proving ground.
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 Chicago founders — mobile and web ship from one team on shared infrastructure.
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- and buyer-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 survives procurement and diligence.
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 Chicago costs anywhere from $13,000 with RapidDev to over $400,000 with a large agency, depending on who builds it. Here is the honest math on the four realistic paths — with real 2025 Chicago numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Chicago
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Big Chicago / 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 Chicago | ~$400K – $450K / yr | 3–5 months just to hire, then build |
| Big Chicago / US agency | $120K – $400K+ | 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 Chicago engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Chicago 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 Chicago 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 Chicago founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Chicago founder had a Lovable prototype for a freight-tracking app but couldn't integrate with a customer's legacy TMS or pass the security review to onboard their first enterprise carrier.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real RLS, added the TMS integration, and shipped native iOS + Android — clearing the carrier's security checklist and closing the pilot.
Challenge: A MATTER-based team's clinical intake tool worked in a demo but had no HIPAA-aware data model and no way to onboard a hospital pilot.
What we shipped: We shipped a role-based provider portal on Next.js, moved PHI into a properly scoped Postgres schema, and wired in audit logging ahead of their first health-system contract.
Challenge: A Series A insurtech team 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 and Stripe billing, 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 procurement 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 Chicago 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.
No — we work with Chicago founders remotely and asynchronously, with a dedicated point of contact, weekly demos, and a shared board. If you prefer a video kickoff or working sessions on Central time, we schedule around your calendar. Plenty of our Chicagoland clients we've never met in person, and their apps shipped just the same.
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 Chicago teams selling into logistics, insurance, healthcare, and finance. We build real auth, scoped data access, audit logging, and the integrations your buyer's back office actually needs — the architecture that holds up when their security team digs in. Many of our Chicago clients close their first enterprise pilot 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 team carries full salaries, benefits, and months of ramp-up before anything ships; 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 Chicago 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 Chicago and Chicagoland — 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 Chicago profile on Google MapsRemote-friendly · Serving the greater Chicagoland 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 Chicago and Chicagoland · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
