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Blog Summary:
This blog outlines the Cost to Build an App Like Affirm, including the average cost range and the factors that directly impact it. We also discuss its benefits, important features, and various development steps. Continue reading the entire post to plan your next project effectively.
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In today’s age, where online shopping is increasingly dominant, the emergence of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) apps has become crucial. It has fueled the growth of online shopping by transforming traditional purchasing into a more flexible, seamless experience. It lets customers split payments and pay conveniently, fostering the growth of the BNPL market.
According to Future Market Insights, the BNPL market size is likely to reach $97.6 billion by 2035, up from $13.6 billion in 2025. It’s expected to grow at a CAGR of 21.8% during these periods. Many leading players, including Affirm, drive the unprecedented growth of the BNPL market.
Developing an Affirm-like app helps businesses increase their sales, build customer loyalty, and get a competitive edge in today’s digital age. So, what is the Cost to Build an App Like Affirm? Well, it depends on many factors, including features. In this blog, we will discuss it in detail.
An app like Affirm offers a myriad of benefits not only for businesses but also for customers. It reduces the gap between accessibility and affordability. We will discuss some of the top benefits in-depth:
Affirm has a simple yet powerful financial model, which has contributed significantly to its success. It enables users to buy quickly and pay over time through structured installments. They don’t need to pay any compounding interest or hidden fees. The app allows users to manage their expenses effectively while enjoying complete financial freedom.
An Affirm-like app motivates customers to buy what they need without the burden of upfront costs. Flexible payment options help them extend their budgets for high-value purchases. This enhances their purchasing power, increases average order value, and improves user satisfaction.
E-commerce businesses can use an Affirm-like BNPL app to maximize sales conversions and encourage customer purchases. It also increases repeat business. By offering manageable installment options, customers are more likely to complete purchases rather than abandon carts.
Transparency is another important benefit of the Affirm app. Whether it’s total payable amounts, repayment schedules, or interest, it ensures visibility into everything to build trust and loyalty among users. Implementing the same strategy in your app improves your brand credibility while ensuring full compliance with fintech regulations.
With Affirm-like applications, users can find it highly convenient to apply for financing, receive fast approval, and complete the purchasing process efficiently. It indeed improves the flow while minimizing overall drop-offs, creating a convenient and consistent experience across multiple platforms and devices.
A BNPL app similar to Affirm represents a scalable fintech model. It’s indeed capable of catering to a range of users across sectors such as retail, travel, and healthcare. It comes with automation, data-based credit assessment, and adaptive payment models, which ensure higher scalability.
When it comes to Affirm-like mobile app development costs, they depend on numerous components, including design, development, and integration. We will explore more details of the cost of building such apps as follows:
Well, the average cost to build apps similar to Affirm ranges from $50,000 to $250,000, and can go higher. You need to pay less to create a basic version of such an app, and vice versa. Let’s explore more related details:
For a basic app, the cost generally ranges from $50,000 to $70,000. The reason is that this app includes only a limited and necessary set of features:
For an advanced or full-scale app, the development cost can reach $250,000+. The main reason is that it includes advanced features:
You need to know that the development costs for a BNPL app vary by country. The following are details:
| Country | Hourly Cost | Average Cost |
|---|---|---|
| India | $25 to 70/hour | $50,000 to $100,000 |
| Eastern Europe | $50 to $80/hour | $80,000 to $150,000 |
| USA | $100 to $180/hour | $150,000 to $250,000 |
Apart from actual development costs, you will also come across several hidden costs. It mainly covers maintenance and updates, which account for approximately 20% of the overall annual development expenses.
Third-party integration is another factor that maximizes the overall additional costs. This integration includes payment gateways, credit bureaus, KYC/AML tools, and more. It also ensures full regulatory compliance with financial laws, including GDPR, PCI DSS, and more.
Startups should always prefer building a minimum viable product (MVP) to gradually verify scale and demand. On the other hand, enterprises should allocate adequate budgets for API scalability, long-term data security, customer support, and more. You need an agile development model and a clear financial roadmap that ensures predictable spending and a fast market launch.
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Many factors are directly associated with the development cost of a BNPL app like Affim. The following are some of those:
The complexity of any BNPL app affects overall development costs. Creating a basic app with the necessary payment modules takes only a few development hours, whereas developing a complex solution can significantly increase costs and effort. In the same way, advanced UI/UX designs with dashboards, custom animations, intuitive navigation, and more also increase design hours and improve user experience.
When you decide to create a native app for iOS and Android, it’s indeed decisive in terms of improved performance. Meanwhile, it requires a separate codebase, which increases costs.
Additionally, cross-platform frameworks such as React Native and Flutter enable developers to reuse code across multiple platforms. It minimizes overall development time and expenses, without sacrificing quality.
Third-party integration is crucial for any BNPL app. You can leverage APIs for various purposes, such as credit scoring, payment gateways, identity verification, fraud detection, and more. These are essential to improve core functionalities while increasing the overall costs, depending on both licensing and complexity.
Security is not meant to be compromised under any circumstances, especially in BNPL app development. You need to strengthen security by implementing secure data storage, end-to-end encryption, multi-factor authentication, and compliance measures. These are important measures to secure data, and they do indeed increase development costs.
An Affirm-like BNPL app should feature a user-centric, customized interface that boosts user engagement. Meanwhile, it also increases the overall design and testing efforts.
You need to implement key features such as microinteractions, dark mode, adaptive layouts, and more. These improve usability while maximizing overall development budget and timeline.
You need to understand that team composition plays a significant role in determining overall cost. It’s important to consider that a large team delivers improved results but also maximizes overall expenses.
Apart from this, location also matters a lot. Teams located in Western Europe, the USA, etc., charge more per hour than development teams in India or Southeast Asia.
Integrating the required features is important to make a BNPL app engaging and thus successful. Below are some of the features you can consider to integrate into the app:
A highly secure, smooth user onboarding process serves as the foundation for an app like Affirm. It should allow users to register hassle-free using their personal details, such as phone numbers, email addresses, and social media accounts.
The app should include a Know Your Customer (KYC) verification module to comply with financial regulations. It’s a highly important module that serves its core purpose: user identity verification.
For this, they use facial recognition, government-issued IDs, document uploads, and more. It guarantees that only verified users can access credit-based services while minimizing fraud and maintaining regulatory compliance.
Your BNPL app should have a powerful credit assessment system to determine users’ loan eligibility. It uses AI models or internal algorithms to determine users’ spending behavior, repayment history, risk profiles, etc.
Users with impressive credit scores receive a higher purchase limit. On the other hand, new users with low credit scores receive an offer of small installments to build trust.
Flexible payment and repayment options are other features your app should include. It should allow users to split their overall payment into installments. These should be weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
The app should display everything clearly, including the total payable, due dates, and interest. These are essential to maintain transparency. To offer convenience, the app should offer features such as one-tap repayment, auto-debit, custom installment plans, and more.
An app similar to Affirm needs to include merchant APIs and SDKs. It should let online stores embed BNPL options into their checkout flow completely. When users opt for “Payment”, they should be able to quickly apply for credit and complete the purchase without leaving the merchant’s website.
When it comes to transparency and control, they are highly important for maintaining user trust. With detailed transaction history, users can easily monitor their repayments, purchases, and outstanding balances.
An analytics dashboard is highly important for both merchants and admins. It should offer valuable insights into loan performance, user behavior, repayment trends, and more.
Automated alerts and notifications are important for on-time repayments and engagement. Whether it’s emails, push notifications, or in-app alerts, these are useful for reminding users of special offers, successful payments, due dates, and more. Smart reminders effectively minimize late payments and increase repayment rates.
Data security is highly important due to the sensitive nature of the data. So, your app should include high-grade security features such as multi-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, secure cloud storage, and more. These features help strengthen data security. Ensure the app complies with PCI DSS standards for payment security and data privacy.
We build tailored BNPL app solutions that help your business grow by providing smooth financial experiences for customers. Let’s discuss more about your projects.
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Developing a BNPL application like Affirm involves a well-defined process with multiple steps. These combine fintech innovation, user experience, and compliance into a smooth ecosystem. We will explain each step in detail:
The first step is to conduct market research to gather information on user behavior, payment trends, and demand for BNPL services in your target region. In this step, your development team gets details about your competitors to understand what works well for them and what does not. This step is necessary for defining value propositions and identifying gaps.
This step involves defining the core objective and future scope of your app. You need to decide whether your app will emphasize only e-commerce users or also extend to healthcare, travel, or education. The following are the most important features you need to outline for your app:
Choosing the best technology stack is important for performance, scalability, and security. For front-end development, you can use several frameworks, such as Flutter and React Native, for cross-platform compatibility.
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For the back end, you can select tech stacks such as Python, Node.js, Java, and more. These are indeed a perfect choice. In addition, you can integrate secure APIs for credit bureaus, payment gateways, identity verification, and more.
When it comes to design, it’s highly important for both user trust and retention. Designers craft an intuitive, clean, mobile-first interface that simplifies the loan application and payment process.
To visualize a complete app’s flow, it’s important to create a clickable prototype. This step involves a range of interactions to maximize accessibility, refine user journeys, and ensure consistency in brand experience.
Once the design is ready, the development phase starts. Developers create back-end systems, front-end interfaces, databases, and more while integrating third-party APIs for payments, credit checks, analytics, and more.
Developers use an agile method, which helps them deliver features in sprints and test them. They also ensure robust security measures to protect sensitive financial data.
In this step, QA professionals conduct rigorous testing to verify that the developed app meets expectations and is free of bugs. They conduct a variety of tests, including security, functionality, and regulatory compliance. Performance testing is necessary to provide smooth operations under a heavy user load, whereas usability testing verifies a frictionless customer experience.
Once the development team completes testing successfully, they submit the app to Google Play and the App Store. It ensures full compliance with various platform-based guidelines.
They provide post-launch support for various purposes such as bug fixing, maintenance, and feature updates. It’s important to monitor continuously on transaction performance, user feedback, compliance requirements, etc., for long-term optimization.
We, as a leading application development company, offer a one-stop solution to make your BNPL app development journey successful, from conceptualization to implementation. Our developers specialize in secure integration, compliance-ready architectures, and more to deliver user-centric and scalable solutions.
We develop world-class fintech app solutions integrated with next-generation features. We work in an agile way using a robust tech stack. Our developers build AI-based credit systems and payment gateways to allow you to launch a powerful BNPL app that boosts customer trust and conversions while maximizing sustainable business growth.
If you have made it this far, you are well-versed in the costs of building an app like Affirm. So, what are you waiting for? It’s now time to plan and formulate strategies to develop your app. Don’t forget to conduct thorough market research and gather details on the target audience, market conditions, and other relevant factors.
You also need to decide which features to implement to increase your app’s chances of success. Once you’ve completed everything, partner with us to develop a secure, future-ready, and scalable app.
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Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
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