Desktop app development cost for government & public sector

There is no single figure, and quoting one would be the least useful thing this page could do — the same pairing spans several-fold depending on scope, compliance and how many surfaces you ship. What this page gives you instead is what the pairing demands: the regimes that may apply, the systems of record you will be asked to integrate with, the device matrix and the release path. The calculator below is already fixed to Desktop and government & public sector — answer what is left and it returns a cost range, hours, timeline, team and running costs for your scope.

Because government & public sector brings its own obligations before you write a feature: Section 508 / WCAG 2.2 AA, FedRAMP, SOC 2 Type II may apply, you will be asked to integrate with systems like Login.gov / ID.me and Government payment gateway, and there are typically 5 distinct roles rather than one. The platform contributes its own separate costs — the device matrix, installers and code signing — and those are independent of the industry.

Electron is the pragmatic default: you ship one web codebase to Windows, macOS and Linux, and if you already have a web app much of it transfers. The costs are a 80–150MB binary and heavier memory use. Tauri produces far smaller, faster binaries using the system webview and is a strong choice for new work, at the price of a smaller talent pool and Rust in your stack. Go fully native — Swift or .NET — when performance, deep OS integration or platform-idiomatic feel is the product, as in professional creative and clinical tools.

A Windows OV certificate is roughly $200–$400 a year and an EV certificate $300–$700; without one, SmartScreen warns every user until you accumulate reputation. Apple requires a $99/year Developer Program membership plus notarisation, and an unsigned app simply will not launch. On top of the fees, budget 40–70 hours to build signing into CI, implement auto-update with rollback, and produce enterprise installers. This is the line item desktop estimates most often omit.

Roughly 8–12% if you build with it from the start: semantic structure, focus management, keyboard operation, contrast discipline, screen-reader testing and a published conformance report. Retrofitting it into a finished product costs two to four times that, because the fixes are often structural rather than cosmetic. For public-sector work it is a contractual requirement, so treat it as scope rather than polish.

It is a planning estimate, not a quote. The band shown is roughly plus or minus 15–20% for a well-defined scope, and wider while requirements are still moving. It is built from engineering hours per discipline, converted at our blended delivery rate, so the hours are directly comparable to a real proposal line by line — but a firm price needs a technical specification, which is the step after budgeting.