The Hidden Costs of Shipping a Mobile App
Building a mobile app is getting easier every year. Turning it into a commercial product - especially from Spain, without a formal company - still has expensive, non-obvious walls.
Building a mobile app is getting easier every year. Shipping one as a commercial product is not.
That gap is the part most tutorials skip. When we started Mirror, our first real fear was not the product: we just had a nice idea and we wanted to test it. It was how we were going to sell it, and who is legally responsible while there is no formal company yet.
Building got cheap. Distribution did not.
First came the official languages: Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS. Then hybrid frameworks - Flutter, React Native - and helpers like Expo that collapse a lot of native friction. Now AI can take you from zero to a working service in weeks. Work that used to take months.
If your goal is a prototype, a side project, or a demo that runs on your phone, the barrier keeps falling. That part is real.
A commercial app is a different animal. You are not only writing code. You are entering store policies, tax identity, public contact details, and recurring legal overhead. A SaaS you host yourself does not force you to publish a personal home address just to accept payments. App stores do.
That is the hidden wall: the product can exist before the business is ready to absorb the cost of existing publicly.
Without a company, someone is still liable - usually you
This is the part that bit hardest when we thought about Mirror as more than a prototype.
If there is no legal entity, almost every "company-shaped" decision collapses onto a person:
Trademark registration. Who files the brand? In whose name does it sit? If a co-founder leaves, who owns the name users already know?
Intellectual property and created assets. Code, designs, models, copy, icons, marketing materials - without a company, ownership lives in contracts between people, or in nothing at all. "We built this together" is not a title deed.
Store publisher identity. Publish as an individual developer on Google Play or the App Store and you are the legal face of the listing: verification, policy compliance, takedowns, payments, tax forms. Publish as an organization and the company is the public party - which is exactly why stores push you toward incorporation if you care about privacy or separation of risk.
Terms of service and privacy policy. Those documents need a data controller and a contracting party. Without a company, that is typically a named individual - the same person whose address may already appear on the storefront.
None of this is exotic law. It is the boring reality that a product with users already has legal edges, even before it makes money.
From day one, a company would make most of this cleaner: one owner for the trademark, one owner for the IP, one organization account for the stores, one entity in the legal pages. The problem is not the paperwork concept. The problem is the cost of keeping that entity alive while revenue is still a maybe.
Many tech products do not reach consistent revenue for years, unless the thing sells from day one - which is rare. You can be "building the right product" and still be months or years away from covering the monthly floor of a Spanish limited company.
Stores force identity. Privacy costs money.
This gets especially sharp if the app has any form of in-app payment. Monetization is what turns a listing into a commercial product in the stores' eyes: payments profiles, tax identity, and public contact details stop being optional. Free side projects and paid products do not live under the same pressure.
Jake Lee wrote a clear post about this: Please don't dox me Google. The blunt version is that if you want to earn money on Google Play as an individual, your legal name, phone number, and home address can become public. The practical escape hatch is to publish as an organization with a company address - typically by forming a company and using a registered / office address you can legally put on the storefront.
If the app is free and you do not intend to make money from it, most of the commercial wall above does not apply the same way. What remains is still ugly enough: privacy when verifying your identity with the stores, because the process is excessively strict - exactly the point Jake Lee documents. That, and clearing Google Play's closed testing gate for personal accounts: 14 days with at least 12 testers. Organization accounts, as far as the current rules go, do not have to run that same gauntlet.
I understand the intent. Fraudulent apps are common, and stores want a reachable legal entity behind paid software. The side effect is a wall for small developers: either expose where you live, or pay to create a different legal address.
In the UK that path is relatively cheap. In Spain it is not. Maintaining a company with little or no revenue is expensive enough that many solo builders never clear the first mile of commercialization.
What it actually costs in Spain
These are rough ranges for forming and keeping a small Spanish limited company (SL) alive enough to publish commercially - not tax advice, and not every edge case. Numbers change; treat them as order-of-magnitude reality.
It is not only the share capital. Accounting for a limited company usually costs more than for a solo freelancer. You pay to create the company. And if the business fails, you pay again to wind it down - filings, accounting close-out, dissolution work. Nobody markets that number clearly when you are excited about shipping v1.
Year 1 setup (one-off)
| Concept | Low | Typical | High | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Incorporation (CIRCE, standard bylaws) | 150 € | 250 € | 700 € | Notary + registry + name; accounting firm extra if you hire one |
| Share capital | 1 € | 3.000 € | 3.000 € | Locked in the company account, not a pure expense |
| Neutral company domain | 10 € | 15 € | 100 € | First year; on top of your product domain |
| Google Play Console | - | ~23 € | - | 25 USD, once |
| D-U-N-S | 0 € | 0 € | 0 € | Usual path for developers |
| VoIP / company number (setup) | 0 € | 0-20 € | 50 € | Depends on provider |
| Total setup (excluding capital) | ~160 € | ~300 € | ~850 € | |
| Liquidity to immobilize (with 3.000 € capital) | - | ~3.300 € | ~3.850 € |
Monthly recurring
| Concept | Low €/mo | Typical €/mo | High €/mo | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company-director social security (1 admin) | 449 | 449 | 500+ | Higher brackets if income rises |
| Limited-company accounting / tax advisory | 60 | 120 | 180 | Bookkeeping, filings, annual accounts |
| Registered / fiscal address | 15 | 35 | 50 | Coworking or business center |
| Company domain (prorated) | 1 | 1 | 2 | ~15 €/year |
| Email (Google Workspace or similar) | 0 | 7 | 14 | 1-2 mailboxes; or 0 € on your current host |
| VoIP / company mobile | 3 | 6 | 15 | Public number for the stores |
| Business bank account | 0 | 0-10 | 15 | Many fintechs 0 €; traditional banks charge |
| Apple Developer (prorated) | 8 | 8 | 8 | 99 USD/year ≈ 91 €/year ≈ 7.6 €/mo |
| Google Play | 0 | 0 | 0 | Initial fee only |
| Base monthly subtotal | ~540 | ~630 | ~790 |
Read that again if you are a new indie hoping the app "pays for itself" in month one.
Before the first meaningful euro of revenue, a typical Spain path can ask for roughly 3.300 € immobilized plus about 630 € every month just to keep the legal and store identity alive. That is rent money before product-market fit. It is also why "just ship on the Play Store" is not a neutral suggestion for everyone.
Apple and Google fees are noise next to social security and accounting. The expensive parts are the country, not the SDK.
And those tables still understate the downside: if the product never finds revenue, dissolution has its own bill. The floor is not only "how much to start." It is "how much you burn while waiting" plus "how much you pay if you stop."
Creating apps is fun. Running a business is not optional.
Building Mirror reminded us that technical creation and commercial deployment are different crafts. Code can be a weekend. A store listing with payments, a fiscal address, trademark ownership, IP assignment, and someone named in the privacy policy is a commitment measured in months and money.
If you are a new developer or early startup: building an app can be fun. Managing the business needs people who are committed - legally and economically - not only excited about Kotlin, Flutter, or the latest AI scaffold.
We all have innovative ideas, and with AI it is much easier to turn them into new products. That does not remove the need to decide early who owns what, who is liable, and whether you will incorporate before the first euro arrives. If those answers stay fuzzy, the business often never leaves the runway. The alternative is simple and expensive: accept how much money you will burn until the product actually pays for itself - if it ever does.
The hidden cost is not the framework. It is everything that starts the day you decide the app should make money - and the person who is on the hook until a company exists to take that place.