What It Cost Us to Build a Nurse App: $61,760 in 2025

In 2025, we spent $61,760.64 building Map My Pay. We made $1,042.84 back in sales. That is a net loss of $60,717.80 for the year.

Most people don’t talk about how much money they lose while they build something. We are going to. If you have ever thought about building an app or a side business, this is what it looks like. These are the receipts.

Why we built Map My Pay

You already know Monica and I are nurses. We moved from NYC to Sacramento and paid off $128K in debt in one year.

Back in NYC, we made $45 and $47 an hour. We thought California was out of reach. Everyone said it cost too much, and the Bay Area homes we saw online were way out of our price range.

Then we visited a friend in Roseville who is also a nurse. We thought he rented a small apartment. He owned a brand-new house, just 8 months after leaving NYC. He told us Kaiser nurses were making over $100 an hour.

We found our sweet spot in Sacramento. The cost of living is close to Austin, but the pay is close to the Bay Area. That gap between what nurses earn and what they think they can afford gave us the idea for Map My Pay.

We kept seeing nurses make career choices with the wrong numbers. They would compare $45 an hour to $55 an hour and think the higher number wins. That math leaves out taxes, housing and what you keep at the end of the month.

So we built a tool that answers one thing. It shows where you keep the most money as a nurse after taxes and housing. You can read more in the story of how we launched our nurse salary app.

How the spending grew over time

We shared our costs three times in 2025. Each number covers a different period, so here is how they line up:

Our sales also changed. By September 2025, we had made $1,304.64 from in-app purchases. Our December report shows $1,042.84 in sales for all of 2025.

Our 2025 numbers

Here is what we spent building Map My Pay in 2025, as of December:

Yes, you read that right. We spent $61,760 and made $1,042 back.

Where the 2025 money went

The big takeaway is that 84.74% of our spending went to developers. We weren’t buying ads. We were paying people to write code and build the product.

What we had spent by June 2025

In June 2025, after about 8 months of work, here is what the app had cost us:

That was our own money.

Finding someone to build it

I had no clue how to build an app. So I did what any nurse would do and looked online. I found a dev team. They quoted me $16,000 for a basic version. I told them I only had $14,000, and they said yes.

Looking back, I should have asked more questions. When I described a feature, they built just that. They gave no ideas and no warnings when something might not work. I had to learn to think like a developer.

One month in, I knew money would be tight. That’s when Sumeet stepped in, saw what I was building and got it right away. We went 50/50 on everything from that point on. Without Sumeet, I would have had to sell some of our stocks to pay for the app.

The hidden costs

Nobody tells you about all the extra stuff you need. For data, we needed housing and rent data, school ratings, crime stats, demographics and pay data by location.

Finding the right mix of data providers took months. Some cost too much. Others had bad data, and a few didn’t work at all. Data access alone cost over $2,000.

The business side needed its own list:

• Business registration and legal setup
• Trademark protection
• Developer accounts for the app stores
• Business bank accounts
• Tax ID numbers

The trademark alone was $350. Without it, someone could take your app’s name or logo.

Then there is the D-U-N-S number. To put your app on the App Store as a business, you need one. It is like a Social Security number for your company, and it takes 30 days to get. I found that out the hard way.

What building an app looks like

Picture this. It is 11 PM and I just worked a 12-hour shift. My brain is fried. The developers need answers now, because it is 11 AM in India.

They ask what should happen when a user taps a button, how error messages should look, and what happens if someone skips the setup screens. I never thought about any of it. Every question cost money whether I answered it or not.

By month 5, we had spent $25K. The app worked, but it was ugly. My nurse friends were polite about it, too polite. That’s when you know it’s bad.

So we raised our budget and brought in a very skilled software engineer to lead our team in India. The app finally looked like something nurses would trust with their money data. In June 2025, wages cost us $1,650 a week. It hurt, but it was worth it.

Where things stood in September 2025

We began building in 2024 and shipped our first iOS build in 2025. As of September 21, 2025, we had:

• 1,331 app users (1,326 active)
• 2,791 newsletter subscribers
• An email open rate of about 59.7% and a click rate of about 2.4% over the past 4 weeks
• $1,304.64 in in-app purchases

Costs peaked in June and July. That is when we switched our backend so we could bring the app to the web and let anyone in the world use it.

By September, our Upwork spending dropped. That was because we had not yet paid a $4,000 bill to our old agency for the backend switch.

Agency fees made up most of it, at $33K or 73% of the total. Payroll for a senior software developer and tools made up the rest. We spent nearly $46K in those 9 months to keep Map My Pay running and getting better.

The $40,000 mistake

This is where it gets painful. We made the classic first-time mistake. We built a mobile app first.

Mobile apps are slower to build, harder to change and cost more to test. The smarter move is a simple website first. You test features fast, learn what nurses click on and use, and build the app once the idea is proven.

Instead, we spent over $40,000 going down that road. Then we had to rebuild the base of the whole thing. We switched our tech stack from Laravel to Node.js and React.

If you are not a developer, think of it like this. Halfway through building a house, you find out you poured the wrong foundation. You can’t patch it. You have to start over.

Every mistake that cost us money

• Mobile first instead of web first: Fixing iOS and Android at the same time slowed us down. A web app would have let us ship, test and improve faster.
• Hiring our own staff too soon: Managing full-time staff pulled us away from the product, and progress dropped. We went back to an agency and got our speed back.
• Not enough testing and setup help for users: Some users were blocked from features before they could even see them, and that’s on us.
• Time tracking software: We paid $287.31 for something that didn’t fit our team.
• Too many data providers: We spent months and thousands of dollars testing sources before we found the right mix.
• Background check services: We paid $368.69 for something we never needed.
• Legal templates: We paid $155.32 for documents I could have made for free with ChatGPT.
• Not pushing back on price early: Taking the first price always costs more.
• Keeping the wrong hires: If a new hire doesn’t take action and costs a lot, let them go fast.

How we market to nurses

Most of our marketing is free. As of June 2025, we had over 100,000 followers across our social media, so we don’t have to pay to reach them.

We did test paid marketing. We spent $903.50 on a booth at the American Nurses Association conference in NYC, set for October 9 to 11.

I believe free social media beats every other kind of marketing. It is free, and you get feedback right away. Nurses told us what they wanted: city comparisons, take-home pay after taxes, whether they could afford a house, school ratings and crime data. Every comment shaped the app.

Messages like these keep me going:

“I thought I’d never afford California. Your YouTube channel changed my mind. Now I’m at Stanford making $115/hour.”

“Moved from Florida to Sacramento. Doubled my income. My kids are in better schools. Thank you.”

What we learned

• Start simple: Build a website before you build an app. Test fast and learn faster.
• Most of your cost will be labor: Tools are cheap. Paying people to build is not.
• Sales need a plan, not hope: $1,042 in sales means we haven’t figured out how to make money from it yet. That’s OK for now, but we can’t ignore it forever.
• Building the wrong thing costs more than building slowly: Our $40K mistake proves it.
• Budget $30K to $50K for development: It will be your biggest cost.
• Data costs money every month: Plan for it.
• Every state has its own business rules: Look them up first.
• Get your D-U-N-S number: Do it now, not later.
• Use free trials first: Wait to commit until you are sure.
• Your first quote can be talked down: I saved thousands by asking.
• Find a co-founder: Splitting the costs and the stress makes it all possible.

What’s next

We are still building. The product isn’t done, and sales don’t pay for development yet. We pay for progress out of pocket.

If you have ever thought about building something of your own, like an app, a course or a side business, know this. It will cost more than you think and take longer than you expect. You will make mistakes you could not see coming. Do it anyway.

If you want to see what other nurses have built, read about the most profitable nursing businesses.

Written by Jason, RN. I went from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California and paid off $128K of debt in under a year. I share our numbers in the Nurses to Riches newsletter and on YouTube.