Buy an App Instead of Building One: What €750–€4,500 Actually Gets You

Buying a finished app means acquiring its source code, its intellectual property, and — when it is already published — its App Store listing, complete with the ratings and ranking history it has accumulated. At the bottom of that price range you are paying less than two weeks of a contract developer's time for something that already works on a phone. The catch is that "app for sale" covers everything from a transferable, revenue-capable product to a template that has been resold four hundred times, and the difference is invisible until you know which questions to ask.

TL;DR:

  • A real app sale transfers three things: the complete source, the intellectual property, and the store listing. If any one is missing, you are buying a licence and should pay licence prices.
  • App Store listing transfer keeps the ratings, reviews, ranking history and existing installs. Apple requires the app to have been live for at least 60 days with no unresolved agreements.
  • Value a revenue-earning app on a multiple of monthly profit; value a pre-revenue one on what rebuilding it would cost, discounted for inheriting someone else's decisions.
  • Four checks decide whether the purchase is cheap or expensive: does it build clean, is the IP actually the seller's, can the third-party services move to your accounts, and has it been sold to anyone else.
  • Exclusivity is the whole ballgame. An app sold once is an asset; an app sold repeatedly is a template competing with every other copy of itself.

Table of Contents

What Does It Actually Mean to Buy an App?

There are four different transactions hiding behind the phrase, and they are not priced the same because they are not the same thing.

The first is a code licence. You receive a copy of the source and permission to use it. So does everyone else who pays. This is what most template marketplaces sell, and there is nothing wrong with it provided you know that is what you bought and did not pay asset prices for it.

The second is a source-only sale. You receive the code exclusively, but the app has never been published, or it has been published under the seller's account and stays there. You own something real, but you start from zero in the store: no reviews, no ranking, no installed base.

The third is a full asset sale. Source, intellectual property, and the live store listing all move to you. The app keeps its identity — same bundle identifier, same reviews, same position in search results — and the people who already have it installed simply receive their next update from you.

The fourth is a business acquisition, where the app comes with revenue, a user base, marketing channels and sometimes staff. That is a different market with different diligence, and it starts an order of magnitude higher.

Most of what is worth buying in the €750–€4,500 band is the third kind. That is the sweet spot: finished, published, exclusive, and cheap enough that a single failed bet does not hurt.

Pro Tip: Ask the seller which of these four they are selling before you ask the price. The answer reframes every number that follows.

What Transfers With the Sale, and What Does Not

Get this written into the agreement rather than assumed over email.

What should transfer: the complete source repository including history where it exists; the intellectual property, assigned outright rather than licensed; design files and the app icon; the store listing with its screenshots, description and keywords; in-app purchase and subscription configuration; and documentation good enough that a developer who has never seen the project can build and ship it.

What usually does not transfer automatically: third-party service accounts. Analytics, crash reporting, push notification services, backend hosting and any paid API the app calls all live under the seller's credentials. Each one needs either a migration to your account or a new account and a code change. Ask for the list up front — a five-line answer here is a good sign, and a vague one is not.

What cannot transfer at all: the seller's own developer reputation, any agreement they hold that is specific to their entity, and — depending on how the app was built — licences for commercial components that are tied to a named licensee.

How an App Store Listing Transfer Works

This is the part buyers underestimate, and it is the single biggest reason to prefer a published app over a pile of source.

Apple supports transferring an app between developer accounts from within App Store Connect. When it completes, the listing moves intact: the ratings and reviews, the cumulative download count, the ranking and keyword history, the in-app purchases, and every user who already has it on their phone. Nothing resets. Your first release becomes the next update those users receive, not a new app they have never heard of.

Apple attaches conditions. The app must have been available on the store for at least 60 days. It must have no unresolved agreements, outstanding obligations or open issues on the seller's account. Both sides need an Apple Developer Program membership in good standing. Certain capabilities and entitlements need attention before the transfer will go through, and apps using some of them cannot be transferred at all — worth checking against Apple's current list rather than assuming.

Mechanically it is short. You send the seller your Apple Developer Team ID and the Apple ID email on the account. They initiate the transfer in App Store Connect. You accept it, re-enter your own banking and tax details, and the app appears under your account.

Google Play has an equivalent process for moving apps between developer accounts, with its own requirements and its own review step.

Pro Tip: A two-year-old app with 400 ratings at 4.6 stars is worth considerably more than identical code with no listing — that rating is months of work and marketing spend you are not repeating.

The Due-Diligence Checklist: 12 Things to Check Before You Pay

Work through these in order. The first four are the ones that turn a cheap purchase into an expensive one.

  1. Does it build from a clean checkout? Ask the seller to clone the repository into an empty directory on a current toolchain and build it. "It works on my machine" is a project with undocumented local state, and you inherit that state.
  2. Is the intellectual property genuinely theirs to sell? If contractors or an agency wrote any of it, there must be an assignment in place. Ask directly.
  3. Can every third-party dependency move to your accounts? Get the list, then check each one for transferability and cost.
  4. Has it been sold before? Ask in writing whether the code has been licensed, resold or published as a template anywhere. Exclusivity you cannot verify is exclusivity you do not have.
  5. How old are the dependencies? A React Native or Expo app two major versions behind is a week of upgrade work before you can ship anything.
  6. Does it still pass review? Store guidelines move. An app last submitted three years ago may need changes before its next update is accepted.
  7. What does the crash rate look like? Ask for the crash-free session percentage from the last 30 days.
  8. Where does the data live, and under what law? If the app stores personal data, you inherit the compliance obligation along with it.
  9. Are the in-app purchases configured and working? Subscription state is the most common place a cheap app turns out to be unfinished.
  10. What is the actual running cost? Backend, storage, push, any paid API. A free-to-run app and a €200-a-month app are different purchases at the same price.
  11. Is there documentation? A README that explains the architecture and the release process is worth a surprising fraction of the purchase price.
  12. Why are they selling? The answer is often perfectly mundane — a studio that builds more than it wants to maintain, a founder who moved on. But ask, and listen for the answer that does not fit.

How Do You Value a Finished App?

Two methods, depending on whether it earns money.

If it has revenue, value it on a multiple of trailing monthly net profit. Small mobile apps commonly trade somewhere in the range of twenty to forty times monthly net, with the multiple rising when revenue is stable, diversified and growing, and falling when it depends on a single traffic source, a seasonal spike or a channel the seller controls personally. Ask for twelve months of figures, not three.

If it does not have revenue, value it on rebuild cost. Ask what a competent studio would charge to produce the same app from scratch, then discount for the fact that you are inheriting architecture decisions you did not make and cannot renegotiate. An app you could commission for €18,000 is worth meaningfully less than €18,000 second-hand — but if it is on offer for €1,800, the gap between those numbers is the entire reason to buy rather than build.

Add a premium for a live listing with real ratings. Subtract for old dependencies, thin documentation, and any dependency you cannot move.

Making an Offer Below the Asking Price

Asking prices on finished apps are rarely take-it-or-leave-it, and a serious offer below the listed figure is a normal part of the transaction rather than an insult. Sellers who have built the thing themselves usually have a number they will not go under, and they will tell you quickly if you are beneath it.

What makes an offer land: name a figure rather than asking for "your best price", say what you intend to do with the app, and be ready to move when it is accepted. What makes it fail: an opening number so far below asking that it reads as a time-waster, and a buyer who negotiates hard and then goes quiet.

On our own catalogue an offer can be made on any listing, and an accepted offer reserves the project for 72 hours so you are not negotiating against someone else's checkout while you arrange the money.

What You Own the Day After

A clean sale should leave you with a repository you can build, a store listing under your own account, and no ongoing obligation to the seller whatsoever. No licence fee, no revenue share, no attribution requirement, no clause that lets them sell the same code to your competitor next month.

That last point is worth dwelling on, because it is where exclusivity earns its price. An app sold once is an asset: whatever position it holds in search results, it holds alone. An app sold four hundred times is a template, and every copy is competing with every other copy for the same keywords, often under near-identical names. The code can be equally good in both cases. The thing you are buying is not.

Pro Tip: Put "the seller will not sell, license or distribute this source to any other party" in the agreement. If they hesitate, you have learned what you needed to know.

Buy or Build? When Building Is Still the Right Call

Buying is not always the answer, and pretending otherwise would be selling rather than advising.

Build when the thing you need does not exist in any form worth adapting; when the app is the business rather than a channel for it, and every detail has to be yours; when you need a specific integration with systems only you have; or when the closest thing for sale is 60% of what you want, because the last 40% of someone else's codebase is usually more expensive than the first 100% of your own.

Buy when the category is well-understood and the finished article is on the table; when you want to be live this month rather than next quarter; when you are testing a market and want the cheapest credible way into it; or when the store listing and its history are worth more to you than the code.

If you are somewhere between the two, the honest test is this: open the listing, read the feature list, and count the things you would change. Under five, buy it. Over fifteen, build.

How Kellosolutions Sells Apps

We build mobile apps and SaaS products as a studio, and we sell finished ones outright from a catalogue of twenty-one projects priced between €750 and €4,500.

Every project is sold once, to one owner. The listing leaves the catalogue the moment payment clears — it is not licensed, not resold, and not available to anyone else afterwards. A sale includes the complete source code and documentation, and where the listing names a published app, the App Store listing is transferred rather than resubmitted, so the reviews, ratings and ranking history come with it.

Payment is a single card transaction in euros through Stripe, and the source archive downloads immediately on the page as well as arriving by email. Offers below the asking price can be made on any listing, and an accepted offer holds the project for 72 hours.

Worth a look if you want to see the shape of the thing: SKIPO | QuitAlcohol at €2,450 tracks alcohol-free days, money saved and rewards; PetCare | Daily Reminder at €1,490 is a smaller, self-contained example; and FileFly | Share & Upload Files at €4,500 is an iOS and web pair with credit-based in-app purchases.

See What Is for Sale

Twenty-one finished projects, each sold once, with full source and App Store handover. Browse the apps for sale, or if nothing there is close enough, tell us what you need and we will build it.

Sources

FAQ

Is it cheaper to buy an app or build one?

Buying is cheaper almost every time, because you are paying for work already done rather than for the risk that it goes wrong. A finished, published iOS app in the low-thousands of euros represents a few hundred hours of design, development, store submission and bug-fixing. Commissioning the same thing new starts in the low tens of thousands. Building wins only when what you need does not exist, or when the finished thing on offer is close enough to be tempting but far enough that you would rewrite half of it.

Do you get the source code when you buy an app?

You should, and if the seller will not commit to it in writing, walk away. A sale without source is a licence with extra steps: you cannot fix a crash, you cannot ship an update when the operating system changes underneath you, and you cannot sell it on. Insist the contract assigns the intellectual property outright rather than granting a perpetual licence, and that the handover includes the repository, the signing assets and the documentation needed to build it.

Can an app be transferred to my Apple Developer account?

Yes. App Store Connect supports transferring a published app between developer accounts, and the listing moves intact — ratings, reviews, ranking history, in-app purchases and the people who already installed it all come with it. Apple attaches conditions: the app must have been available for at least 60 days, it must have no unresolved agreements or outstanding issues, and both parties need an Apple Developer Program membership in good standing. You supply your Team ID and the Apple ID on the account, and the seller opens the transfer.

How do you value a finished mobile app?

If it earns money, value it on a multiple of trailing monthly profit — small apps typically change hands somewhere between twenty and forty times monthly net, less when the revenue is short-lived or concentrated in one channel. If it does not earn money yet, value it on rebuild cost: what a competent studio would charge to produce the same thing, discounted for the fact that you inherit someone else's decisions. A published listing with real installs and a usable rating is worth a premium over identical code with no store history.

What should I check before buying an app?

Confirm four things above all: that the source builds from a clean checkout on a current toolchain, that the intellectual property is genuinely the seller's to sell, that any third-party service the app depends on can be moved to your accounts, and that the app is not already licensed to other buyers. Everything else on a due-diligence list matters, but those four are the ones that turn a cheap purchase into an expensive one.