RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Portland, 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 Portland (roughly $370,000–$395,000 in the first year for two engineers) or commissioning a Portland agency ($40,000–$200,000 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 Silicon Forest founders go from Figma or a Lovable prototype to a production app your users — and your investors — actually trust.
Portland isn't a place that gets impressed by a slide deck — it's a maker city, anchored by hardware and physical product, and that shapes what a launch has to be. Intel is Oregon's largest private employer with more than 22,000 people in Hillsboro, the Silicon Forest holds 200-plus semiconductor businesses, and the metro is the densest cluster of athletic-apparel and outdoor brands in the country, led by Nike and Columbia with Adidas' North American HQ down the road. That means your users have real-world quality expectations and your investors — increasingly Seattle and Bay Area firms scouting Portland for its lower burn and strong talent — want a working product, not a mockup. It also means the exact engineers you'd want to hire are being courted by Intel, Nike, and OHSU. We build for that reality: the polish that ships to real users, the architecture that survives diligence, and the speed that keeps a lean Portland runway intact.
Intel's 22,000-plus Hillsboro workforce, plus Tektronix, Microchip, Nike's digital org, and OHSU, all compete for the same senior engineers. That's great for the ecosystem and brutal for a seed-stage founder trying to hire. Bringing us in lets you ship your v1 now and recruit deliberately later, from a position of traction.
Portland Seed Fund, PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment), OEN, and Starve Ups — Oregon's original accelerator with 142 investments to date — all optimize for lean, durable companies rather than blitzscaling. We match that ethos: a fixed-price, capital-efficient build that stretches your runway instead of burning it.
The Google-backed Oregon AI Accelerator launched its first cohort of 20 startups in February 2026, and AI-related job titles jumped 7x across the region in early 2025. If you're building an AI feature, we wire it to your data with streaming, evals, and cost controls — a real product, not a demo that falls over.
In a city of apparel designers, hardware engineers, and OHSU clinicians, software is judged by whether it actually works. Portland users don't tolerate a laggy app the way a pure-software market might. Weekly deployed builds you can test on real devices keep quality honest the whole way through.
the Silicon Forest by the numbers
Who we build for in the Silicon Forest
Commerce, membership, and community apps for the country's densest cluster of apparel and outdoor brands — Nike, Columbia, Adidas, Keen, and the startups orbiting them.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for the OHSU health corridor and the med-tech founders spinning out of it.
Sensor dashboards, monitoring apps, and marketplaces for Oregon's deep cleantech bench — the sector VertueLab and the state have bet on for a decade.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for Portland's steady stream of enterprise-software startups.
LLM-powered products with streaming UIs and vector search — the category the Google-backed Oregon AI Accelerator is now pouring fuel on.
High-polish iOS and Android apps with real-time feeds and push, for Portland's consumer and indie-gaming scene.
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 Portland 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, 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 Portland costs anywhere from $13,000 with RapidDev to over $200,000 with a local agency, depending on who builds it. Here is the honest math on the four realistic paths — with real 2025 Portland numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Portland
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Portland / 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 Portland | ~$370K – $395K / yr | 2–4 months just to hire, then build |
| Portland / US agency | $40K – $200K+ | 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 Portland engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Portland 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 Portland 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 Portland founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Portland outdoor-gear founder had a Lovable prototype for a trip-planning and community app but couldn't get it stable enough to put in front of retail partners.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase, shipped native iOS + Android with offline maps and real-time feeds, and got it to a working pilot with two regional retailers.
Challenge: A team spun out of the OHSU orbit had a patient-intake web app that couldn't pass a security review to onboard its first clinic partner.
What we shipped: We rebuilt it on a proper Postgres schema with real RLS and role-based access, added HIPAA-aware auth, and cleared the clinic's security checklist.
Challenge: A VertueLab-backed team had outgrown a Bubble MVP for energy-monitoring dashboards — every new sensor type broke the last one and hiring engineers into it was impossible.
What we shipped: We migrated their data into Postgres and rebuilt the product on Next.js with a real multi-tenant model, so they could finally onboard customers and hire.
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 Portland 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 Silicon Forest founders remotely and asynchronously, which is how most Portland teams operate anyway. 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 Pacific 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 Series A teams here. Portland investors — and the Seattle and Bay Area firms scouting the region — 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 Portland 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 — and Portland agencies bill $100–$185 an hour, which adds up fast. A small, senior-only team does the work directly, so 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 each time. An in-house team, meanwhile, carries full salaries, benefits, and months of ramp-up 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 Portland 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 Portland and the Silicon Forest · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
