Solana App Development Costs: What Nobody Tells You Before You Start
So you've decided to build on Solana. Good choice. Fast transactions, low fees, growing ecosystem. Makes sense for a lot of projects. But here's where most businesses go wrong. They get a quote, approve a budget, and then discover halfway through that the number they agreed to was never the real number. This post is about what actually costs money in a Solana project and where the surprises tend to show up. The Quote Is Usually Incomplete When you ask a development agency for a price, they quote what you asked for. Nothing more. What most quotes leave out: A security audit is non-negotiable if your app handles real money. A proper audit from a firm that knows Solana typically costs between $5,000 and $20,000 depending on how complex your program is. Most agencies will not include this in their first quote unless you specifically ask. Testing across environments takes real time. Developers test first on a local setup, then on a test network, then on the live Solana network bef...