RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Denver, 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 on the Front Range (roughly $360,000–$395,000 in true first-year cost for two engineers) or commissioning a Denver 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 Denver and Front Range founders go from Figma or a Lovable prototype to a production app your users — and your investors — actually trust.
Denver has quietly become one of the strongest startup metros between the coasts — the region raised roughly $4 billion across 220-plus companies in 2025, ranking ahead of Chicago and just behind Austin. But it builds with a different discipline than the Bay Area: office space and engineering talent cost 40–60% less than San Francisco or New York, runways stretch further, and founders are rewarded for shipping capital-efficient products rather than torching a raise. Denver's funding also skews toward hard, real-world sectors — AI applied to energy and health, climate and clean tech, aerospace, and outdoor recreation — where a working product beats a slide deck. We build for that reality: the polish that survives an investor meeting, the architecture that survives technical diligence, and the speed that keeps a lean team moving.
Techstars — one of the most influential accelerators in the world, with 3,500+ companies backed globally — is headquartered in Denver, and its Boulder program has run since 2007. When you're in a batch, everyone around you is shipping on the same compressed clock. We've shipped for teams racing exactly that kind of demo deadline.
Every September, Denver Startup Week draws tens of thousands of founders and operators as the largest free entrepreneurship event in North America, and effectively every Colorado investor is in the room. It's a hard, public checkpoint — and the version of your product you show there needs to be real, not a mockup.
Denver founders raise smaller rounds and stretch them further than coastal peers, so every dollar of build spend has to earn its place. A fixed-price v1 that ships in weeks — instead of an open-ended in-house payroll — is the model that fits the way the Front Range actually funds companies.
Colorado has the nation's second-largest aerospace economy, a fast-growing cleantech scene, and a health-tech cluster anchored by the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. These are product categories where compliance, telemetry, and real data models matter from day one — exactly the foundations we build in rather than bolt on later.
the Front Range by the numbers
Who we build for in the Front Range
Grid, solar, and carbon apps for the Front Range cleantech scene — the sector that pulled nearly $1B in Denver funding in 2025.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for the health-tech cluster anchored by the Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora.
LLM-powered products with streaming UIs and usage-based billing — Denver's biggest funding category, applied to energy, health, and education.
Ground-control dashboards, fleet telemetry, and mission tooling for Colorado's aerospace corridor — second only to California nationally.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for the Front Range's deep bench of capital-efficient vertical SaaS teams.
Trip planning, booking, and gear marketplaces for Colorado's outdoor-recreation economy — a category that punches far above its national weight here.
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 Denver 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-facing marketing sites to the logged-in product itself — dashboards, admin panels, telemetry views, 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 raises well.
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 Denver 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 2025–2026 Denver numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Denver
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Denver / 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 Denver | ~$360K – $395K / yr | 3–5 months just to hire, then build |
| Denver / 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 Denver engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Denver 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 Denver 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.
Growth-stage teams replacing a no-code MVP or adding serious AI features.
A few of the builds we've shipped for Denver founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Front Range cleantech founder had a Lovable prototype for a home-energy tracking app but couldn't move real utility data through it or bill customers.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real RLS, wired in a proper data model for meter reads, and shipped native iOS + Android with Stripe subscriptions.
Challenge: A team near the Anschutz Medical Campus had a provider-facing dashboard demo that fell over under real patient volume and had no audit trail.
What we shipped: We shipped a Next.js provider portal with role-based access, HIPAA-aware logging, and a Postgres schema that held up when their first clinic pilot went live.
Challenge: A Denver aerospace team had outgrown a Bubble MVP for fleet telemetry — every new feature broke two others and streaming data was impossible.
What we shipped: We migrated their data into a proper Postgres schema and rebuilt the product on Next.js with a streaming dashboard, 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 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 Denver 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 Front Range founders remotely and asynchronously, which is how most Denver teams already operate. 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 Mountain Time.
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 growth-stage teams here. Colorado investors expect a real product they can put in front of users, not a clickable mockup — 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 Front Range 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 Denver team carries full salaries near $130K each, 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 Denver 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 Denver and the Front Range — 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 Denver profile on Google MapsRemote-friendly · Serving the greater the Front Range 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 Denver and the Front Range · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
