RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Philadelphia, 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 Philadelphia (roughly $370,000 in the first year for two engineers) or commissioning a Philadelphia 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 Greater Philadelphia founders go from a Figma file or a Lovable prototype to a production app that clears a hospital security review and holds up in investor diligence.
Philadelphia is the one major US startup ecosystem that grew every year from 2020 through 2024, and it did it on the back of research, not hype. The region's 120+ universities and research hospitals — led by the University of Penn, which ranks first in the world for CAR-T cell patents, and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia — turned the city into 'Cellicon Valley,' now home to more than 60 cell-and-gene-therapy companies and countless CROs and labs. That gravity shapes what a launch has to be here: your buyer is often a hospital, a payer, or a regulated fintech, and they run security reviews before they run a pilot. Talent is real and roughly a third cheaper to hire than San Francisco, but it's still slow to land, and every serious health or finance product has to clear a diligence bar that a demo can't fake. We build for that reality — the polish that survives a partner meeting, the architecture that survives a HIPAA or vendor-security review, and the speed that keeps a lean, capital-efficient Philly startup moving.
Penn Medicine and CHOP made Philadelphia the birthplace of FDA-approved cell and gene therapies, and Penn ranks #1 globally for CAR-T cell patents. More than 60 cell-and-gene-therapy companies now cluster here, from The Discovery Labs' 2.4M-sq-ft campus in King of Prussia outward. If your product touches health data, your buyer expects HIPAA-grade rigor by default.
Startup Genome named Philadelphia the only US ecosystem to grow between 2020 and 2024, and a top-10 global VC market. Over the last five years the region absorbed roughly $1.12B across 426 seed rounds and $7.49B across 448 early-stage rounds — steady, research-driven capital rather than boom-and-bust.
Comcast NBCUniversal's LIFT Labs, Dreamit Ventures, Ben Franklin Technology Partners, and StartupPHL give Philly founders something rarer than money: distribution and enterprise access. We've shipped for teams building toward exactly those partnership milestones, where a working product beats a pitch deck.
Philly founders raise less and stretch it further than coastal peers, and engineering talent costs roughly a third less than San Francisco. That makes a fixed-price, ship-in-weeks build a natural fit — you get to your fundable v1 without burning a seed round on salaries and months of ramp-up.
Greater Philadelphia by the numbers
Who we build for in Greater Philadelphia
HIPAA-aware patient, provider, and trial apps for Philadelphia's cell-and-gene-therapy corridor around Penn Medicine, CHOP, and the region's 60+ therapeutics companies.
Payments, lending, and insurance apps that need Stripe, real compliance, and security that survives a bank or carrier review from day one.
Data-heavy tools for the labs and CROs spinning out of the region's 120+ universities and its 430,000-strong student research pipeline.
Consumer and streaming products in Comcast NBCUniversal's backyard — real-time feeds, push, and the polish a media audience expects.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for the region's deep bench of vertical SaaS and enterprise-services startups.
Learning and campus platforms built for a metro with 120+ colleges and one of the densest concentrations of students in the country.
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 Philadelphia founders — mobile and web ship from one team on shared infrastructure, with the security posture health and fintech buyers 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 provider or 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 security review and 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. If you're in health or fintech, we scope the security and compliance posture up front.
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 Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Philly
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Philadelphia / 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 Philly | ~$355K – $390K / yr | 3–5 months just to hire, then build |
| Philadelphia / 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 Philadelphia engineering team's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Philadelphia 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 Philadelphia 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 or compliance features.
A few of the builds we've shipped for Philadelphia founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Philadelphia founder had a Lovable prototype for a patient-engagement app but couldn't clear a health system's security review to land their first CHOP-adjacent pilot.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real RLS and HIPAA-aware access controls, shipped native iOS + Android, and cleared the pilot's security checklist.
Challenge: A Ben Franklin–backed team's lending product worked in a demo but had no real payments flow and no way to pass a partner bank's vendor-security review.
What we shipped: We moved payments to Stripe, hardened auth and audit logging, and shipped a web + mobile product that cleared the bank's review before their raise.
Challenge: A Series A 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, 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 health-system 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 — it's one of the most common reasons Philadelphia health and life-sciences founders come to us. We scope the security and compliance posture up front, build HIPAA-aware access controls, real row-level security, audit logging, and encryption, and hand you the architecture documentation a health system's vendor review asks for. Many of our Philly clients land their first pilot on the version we ship.
Yes, and it's one of the most common reasons Philadelphia 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 compliance 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 or compliance 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 Greater Philadelphia founders remotely and asynchronously, which is how most teams operate now. 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. Philadelphia investors and enterprise partners expect a real product, 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 regional clients raise or land their first 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. Two Philadelphia engineers cost roughly $355,000 in the first year once you load salaries, benefits, and recruiting — and that's before anything ships. 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 Philadelphia 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.
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 Philadelphia and Greater Philadelphia · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
