A mobile app design agency
That helps you acquire, retain and engage
your users.

Cost depends on scope, but the variables are predictable. A focused audit of one flow is a fixed, contained engagement. A full app design scales with the number of platforms, how many user types the app serves, how much research is required, and whether a design system is part of the work.  A UX audit of one major flow is $499. Most full engagements start at $10,000.  Four things move the number more than anything else:  How many platforms. iOS and Android are not one design job priced twice, but they are not two unrelated jobs either. Tablet and wearable surfaces add real scope. How many distinct user types. A single consumer persona is not the same problem as a consumer app plus an operator console plus an admin view. How much primary research is needed. If you already have behavioral analytics and access to users, we move faster. Whether you need a design system or a set of screens. A system costs more upfront and considerably less over the following year.

Look for evidence of thinking, not just visual polish. Most mobile app design portfolios show finished screens in a device mockup. Very few show the reasoning that produced them, and the reasoning is what you're actually buying.  Five questions worth asking before you sign:  Have you shipped an app in my category, at my stage, with my constraints? A consumer social app and a regulated fintech app are different problems wearing the same rectangle. Can I use something you designed, on my phone, right now? Ask for a live app in the store, not a case study PDF. Screens are easy to produce; a product still in use is not. What happens when the designs reach engineering? Handoff failures are the most common way app engagements go wrong. Ask specifically how they work with mobile developers and how states and edge cases get specified. How do you decide what to fix first? If the answer is a severity score rather than business impact, you'll get a list instead of a plan. What does success look like, and when do we measure it? Retention, activation, task success. An agency unwilling to name a metric before starting is unlikely to be measured against one afterward.  The strongest signal is an agency willing to tell you when you don't need them, or when a smaller engagement would serve you better.

A focused redesign of one critical flow runs two to four weeks. A full mobile app design engagement, from research through a tested, developer-ready prototype, typically runs six to twelve weeks. Our MVP engagements are guaranteed at eight weeks.  The variable is research depth and the number of platforms, not screen count. We work in two-week sprints, each closing with a review, so you see the app taking shape while there's still time to change it. When the date genuinely cannot move, we compress: StoryFire went from concept to a branded, user-tested, build-ready iOS MVP in two weeks on site, because the launch was tied to a film release and the window was fixed.  We give you a firm timeline during scoping, before the engagement starts.

An in-house designer works within a single product context. They learn your app deeply, which is valuable, but they only ever see one way of solving a problem. An agency brings pattern recognition from across hundreds of products, an outside view on decisions your team stopped questioning, and a senior team ready to start immediately.  There's also a math question. A senior product designer costs six figures a year plus benefits, takes four to six months to hire, and roughly a year to reach full productivity. If the work is a defined push rather than a permanent function, that's a heavy commitment to make before you know what you need.  Hire in-house when mobile design is a permanent, always-on function and you can absorb the wait. Hire a freelancer when the work is a contained set of screens you've already specified. Hire a mobile app design agency when the problem isn't fully defined, when the work spans research through delivery across two platforms, or when you need capacity that doesn't disappear if one person becomes unavailable. If you want an embedded senior designer inside your team without the hiring risk, that's our staff augmentation model, matched within 72 hours.

Yes, both. And mostly yes, they need to differ, in the places users have already learned.  Navigation patterns, back behavior, system dialogs, date and file pickers, share sheets, and typography defaults carry platform expectations that users don't consciously notice until you break them. Your brand, layout, information architecture, and content stay shared. The platform-native layer is where we diverge.  The exception is enterprise and internal tooling, where consistency across a mixed device fleet often matters more than platform convention. We make that call with you during scoping rather than applying a rule.

Design is our core service, and most clients take the designs to their own engineering team or to a development partner. We also place front-end and back-end engineers through our staff augmentation model when you need build capacity alongside design.  Either way, engineering is in the conversation before design decisions are locked. Technical constraints shape the work instead of surfacing during implementation, and when a decision carries real build cost, we flag it while it's still cheap to change. There is no moment where finished designs get thrown over a wall.

Yes, and it's one of the more common reasons teams call us. The risk is real. A redesign that delights new users while breaking the muscle memory of the people who already pay you is a net loss.  We handle it by separating the two audiences in research. With Buildbox, a no-code platform used by millions, new users were abandoning before finishing a first project while legacy creators knew the tool cold. The audit combined heuristic evaluation, funnel analytics, heatmaps, and session replays to isolate exactly where new users dropped off, so onboarding could be rebuilt without rewriting what experienced users relied on. Result: 41% more users reached their first success milestone.  Where the risk is high, we validate with both cohorts before launch and stage the rollout so the data arrives before the full audience does.

By product outcomes, not aesthetics. For mobile that usually means activation and time to first value, day-1 / day-7 / day-30 retention, task success rate, conversion through the flow that makes money, and reduced friction signals like rage taps, support tickets, and store review themes.  We agree on the primary metric at kickoff, before any design work starts, so there's no ambiguity later about what we were working toward.  Then we back it. If your app doesn't show measurable improvement in that metric within 90 days of launch, we keep working at no additional cost until it does.

AI has made producing screens fast and cheap. It hasn't made deciding what to build any easier, and that's where most apps fail.  What AI does well: generating layouts, producing component variations, and accelerating the mechanical parts of visual design. What it doesn't do: talk to your users, explain why your day-7 retention dropped last quarter, tell you which of three plausible onboarding sequences matches how your customers actually behave, or push back when a stakeholder wants a permission prompt on the first screen.  The failure pattern we see most is an app where every screen was generated in isolation. Each one looks fine. Patterns drift, the same action behaves differently in three places, and the whole thing feels subtly wrong without anyone being able to say why. That's a systems problem, not a rendering problem, and no amount of prompting fixes it after the fact.  If you need screens produced, AI will get you there faster than we will. If you need to know which screens to produce and in what order, that's still research and judgment.

You do. All design files, research findings, prototypes, design systems, and documentation belong to you and transfer at the end of the engagement.