RapidDev builds custom mobile and web apps in Washington, DC, 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 the DMV (roughly $430,000 a year for two engineers) or commissioning a DC agency ($120,000–$450,000 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 DC founders go from Figma or a Lovable prototype to a production app that survives federal security review — and your investors' diligence.
Washington isn't a consumer-app town chasing the next viral B2C launch — it's the capital of governance, and that shapes what a product has to be. The DMV raised roughly $3.2 billion across 340+ deals in 2025, with the money flowing overwhelmingly into cybersecurity, govtech, and enterprise software rather than social or gaming. Govtech alone is about 22% of the local ecosystem, and PitchBook now ranks DC as the fifth-strongest US venture ecosystem despite being only the 23rd-largest city. What that means for a founder is concrete: your buyer is often a federal agency or a compliance-bound enterprise, your sales cycle can run 12–18 months, and your product will be judged less on flash than on whether it can pass a security review. We build for exactly that — real access control, audit-ready architecture, and the polish that still clears a partner meeting.
DC turned its one native advantage — proximity to government — into an industry. Companies like FiscalNote were built at the intersection of regulation and software right here, and govtech is now roughly 22% of the local startup base. If your product touches procurement, compliance, or public data, your competitors and your customers are already in this ecosystem.
About 68% of the capital flowing into DC companies in 2025 came from out-of-region investors, up from 54% in 2022. Coastal VCs increasingly fund DC teams for the regulatory and government access they can't get elsewhere — which means your product has to demo like a coastal startup while proving it understands the Beltway.
Federal and enterprise buyers here run 12–18 month procurement cycles and gate on security reviews. A no-code prototype rarely clears that bar. We rebuild on real infrastructure with row-level security, audit logging, and access control so your first agency or enterprise pilot doesn't die in the review.
The District backs its own ecosystem directly: Station DC opened in March 2025 with $2M in city funding, and DC's own venture-capital program is seeding local fund managers. Programs like Halcyon (impact/climate/health), FedTech (federal-lab commercialization), and 1776's lineage give mission-driven founders a runway that's distinct from Silicon Valley's.
the DMV by the numbers
Who we build for in the DMV
Procurement, citizen-services, and data apps that have to survive a federal security review and 12–18 month agency sales cycles.
Policy-tracking, lobbying, and compliance platforms — the FiscalNote-style category DC quietly dominates — with roles, audit trails, and real access control.
Grants, benefits, and payment apps wired to Stripe with the security and audit posture a government or enterprise buyer demands.
HIPAA-aware patient and provider apps for the region's dense cluster of health systems, NIH-adjacent research, and public-health nonprofits.
LLM search and analysis over regulatory, legislative, and open-government data — with streaming UIs, evals, and cost controls, not a fragile demo.
Member portals and event apps for the thousands of trade associations and nonprofits headquartered along K Street.
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 Washington, DC founders — mobile and web ship from one team on shared, compliance-aware 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 constituent-facing sites to the logged-in product itself: dashboards, admin panels, member portals, and internal government tooling.
The whole thing, mobile and web, on shared infrastructure. Ideal when you're moving off a Lovable or Bubble prototype that can't pass a security review and need production code that raises — and clears diligence — well.
Ship the AI feature your product actually needs — chat, search, or agents over regulatory or operational data — wired 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 — including the access-control and audit model DC buyers scrutinize — that you sign off on before a line of production code is written.
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 Washington, DC costs anywhere from $13,000 with RapidDev to over $450,000 with a large agency, depending on who builds it. Here is the honest math on the four realistic paths — with real 2025 DC numbers, not a vendor's guesswork.
Hire a team in-house in DC
true first-year cost of a minimal 2-engineer team
Big DC / 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 DC | ~$430K – $470K / yr | 3–5 months just to hire, then build |
| Big DC / US agency | $120K – $450K+ | 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 DC engineer's loaded salary, RapidDev ships your entire app — mobile, web, and backend — in 6 to 12 weeks.
App development in Washington, DC 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 Washington, DC 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 teams shipping a fundable v1 that can clear a first agency or enterprise pilot.
Series A teams replacing a no-code MVP or adding serious AI features.
A few of the builds we've shipped for Washington, DC founders. Details generalized to protect client confidentiality.
Challenge: A DC founder had a Lovable prototype for an agency-procurement tool but couldn't pass the security review required to start a pilot with a federal customer.
What we shipped: We rebuilt the backend on Supabase with real row-level security and audit logging, added SSO, and shipped native iOS + Android — clearing the pilot's review checklist.
Challenge: A DC team's legislation-tracking product ran on a fragile no-code stack and had no way to search across thousands of regulatory documents at speed.
What we shipped: We shipped a Next.js web app with LLM search over their document corpus, added per-seat billing in Stripe, and instrumented evals before their seed raise.
Challenge: A K Street association had outgrown a Bubble member portal — every new feature broke two others, and staff couldn't trust the data during their annual conference.
What we shipped: We migrated members into a proper Postgres schema and rebuilt the portal and event app on Next.js with role-based access, so staff could finally scale membership.
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 agency 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 main reasons DC founders come to us. We build on real infrastructure with row-level security, SSO/OAuth, and audit logging from day one, and we hand over documentation your compliance officer or a customer's review team can actually read. No-code prototypes almost never clear that bar; we rebuild them so your first agency or enterprise pilot doesn't die in the review.
Yes, and it's one of the most common reasons Washington 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 DMV founders remotely and asynchronously. You'll have a dedicated point of contact, weekly demos, and a shared board. If you prefer a video kickoff or working sessions around a grant deadline or agency meeting, 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. DC investors — many of them now out-of-region — expect a real product, not a clickable mockup, and diligence goes deep on architecture. We prioritize the flows that demo well, ship polished builds, and make sure the foundations hold up under technical review. Many of our DMV 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 the federal-compliance overhead baked into Beltway contractor pricing. And we reuse hardened production patterns for auth, payments, and infrastructure instead of rebuilding them each time. An in-house team carries full DC salaries — a full-stack engineer averages around $161K base before benefits — plus 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 Washington, DC 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 Washington, DC and the DMV · Remote-friendly · You own everything we build
