RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Tampa, 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 Tampa Bay (roughly $340,000–$380,000 in the first year for two engineers) or commissioning a local agency ($75,000–$300,000 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 Tampa Bay founders go from Figma or a Lovable prototype to a production app your users — and your investors — actually trust.
Tampa Bay hits a sweet spot most metros can't: a fast-maturing startup ecosystem without Silicon Valley cost of capital. Local startups raised close to $1 billion across 140+ deals in 2025, and the region's economy tops $145 billion a year — powered by financial services (Citi runs one of its largest global technology operations here), a $14 billion defense and cyber cluster around MacDill Air Force Base, hospital systems, and Port Tampa Bay. Founders here get world-class engineering talent at roughly 60% of Bay Area salaries, an accelerator scene that has quietly produced hundreds of funded companies, and no state income tax pulling more of them in every quarter. What that means for a build: your runway stretches further than it would in San Francisco or New York, but your investors — many of them Florida Funders or out-of-state VCs doing diligence — still expect a real, production-grade product. We build for exactly that reality.
Embarc Collective runs a 32,000-square-foot startup hub in downtown Tampa supporting 125+ active companies. Its members have raised over $600M in funding, created 1,200+ high-paying Florida tech jobs, and post a 95% five-year survival rate — nearly double the national average. If you're in that orbit, everyone around you is shipping.
Tampa Bay Wave's portfolio crossed $500M raised in 2025 alone — its biggest year ever — and $1.6B since 2008 across 550+ alumni. Its FinTech|X and HealthTech|X cohorts feed a steady stream of founders who need to turn a demo into a fundable v1 on a tight clock. We've built for exactly that transition.
Tampa Bay's strongest tech verticals are financial services (344,000+ finance jobs regionally, anchored by Citi), healthcare, and a $14B cyber-and-defense cluster tied to U.S. Central Command at MacDill. Apps here often carry real compliance and security requirements from day one — HIPAA, PCI, and diligence-grade architecture — and we scope for that up front.
With Tampa engineer salaries running roughly 60% of Bay Area levels and no Florida state income tax, founders here get more months per dollar raised. The trap is under-investing in the product itself. A fixed-price, senior-only build lets you keep the runway advantage while still shipping something investors take seriously.
Tampa Bay by the numbers
Who we build for in Tampa Bay
Payments, lending, and wealth apps that need Stripe, real compliance, and bank-grade security — Tampa Bay's deepest tech vertical, anchored by Citi's massive local operation.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for the region's hospital systems and the startups coming out of Tampa Bay Wave's HealthTech|X accelerator.
Multi-tenant dashboards, admin panels, and role-based access for the B2B SaaS teams that dominate the Embarc Collective portfolio.
Secure tools and dashboards for the $14B cyber, intelligence, and defense cluster built around MacDill Air Force Base and U.S. Central Command.
Tracking, dispatch, and marketplace apps for the operators moving freight through Port Tampa Bay — Florida's largest port.
Booking, loyalty, and guest apps for the restaurants, resorts, and attractions that drive the Gulf-coast visitor economy.
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 Tampa Bay 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 Tampa costs anywhere from $13,000 with RapidDev to $300,000+ with a large agency, depending on who builds it. Here is the honest math on the four realistic paths — with real 2025–2026 Tampa Bay numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in Tampa
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Tampa / 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 Tampa | ~$340K – $380K / yr | 2–4 months just to hire, then build |
| Tampa / US agency | $75K – $300K+ | 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 Tampa engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Tampa 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 Tampa 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 Tampa founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A Tampa founder had a Lovable prototype for a lending app but couldn't pass a security review to onboard their first banking partner.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real RLS, moved payments to Stripe, and shipped native iOS + Android — clearing the partner's compliance checklist.
Challenge: A Tampa Bay Wave HealthTech|X team's patient-intake demo worked on stage but had no HIPAA-aware data layer and no way to onboard real clinics.
What we shipped: We shipped a HIPAA-aware Postgres schema with role-based access, a provider web dashboard, and a patient mobile app — ready for their first paid clinic.
Challenge: A team serving Port Tampa Bay freight operators 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 real-time dispatch tracking, 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 Tampa Bay 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 Tampa Bay founders remotely and asynchronously, which is how most modern 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 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-stage teams here. Tampa investors — and the out-of-state VCs doing diligence — expect a real product, not a clickable mockup. We prioritize the flows that demo well, ship App-Store-quality polish, and make sure the architecture holds up to technical and security diligence. Many Tampa Bay founders 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 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.
Yes — a lot of Tampa Bay's strongest verticals (health-tech, fintech, and the cyber-and-defense cluster around MacDill) carry real compliance requirements from day one. We scope those in up front: HIPAA-aware data layers with role-based access, PCI-conscious payment flows through Stripe, encryption, audit logging, and architecture built to survive a security review rather than bolted on after launch.
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 Tampa 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 Tampa and Tampa Bay · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
