Free Tools for Mobile App Founders in 2026

The two costs you can’t avoid

Before the free tools: publishing is not free. To put an app on the App Store you need the Apple Developer Program at $99 a year. To publish on Google Play you need a developer account for a one-time $25. Both platforms together come to $124 in year one.

Google adds a time cost too. New personal Play Console accounts must run a closed test with at least 12 testers opted in for 14 days in a row before they can publish to production. Start recruiting testers while you build, not after. The Google Play closed testing guide walks through it.

The free stack at a glance

Free tiers change often. Check the pricing page before you plan a launch around a specific limit.

1. Idea, name, and positioning

Google Trends shows whether interest in a problem is growing or fading, and how it compares across countries. It only gives relative interest, not search counts, so use it to compare ideas, not to size a market. The App Store and Google Play search boxes are the other free signal: the suggestions they show as you type are phrases people actually search for.

Once you have a direction, the ShipNative app name generator gives name ideas and the App Store keyword tool helps shortlist search terms. Both are free and need no login. The app cost calculator estimates what a freelancer or agency would charge for the same scope, which is useful context when you’re deciding how much to build yourself.

Before building, write the idea down as a one-page spec. The free mobile app PRD template is structured so it can go straight into an AI app builder as a prompt.

2. Design

Figma’s Starter plan is free with unlimited personal drafts. Shared team space is limited to three files, which is fine for a solo founder and tight once a designer or co-founder joins. The Figma Community has free iOS and Android UI kits, so you can mock screens with real platform components instead of drawing them.

If you build with AI, you may not need mockups at all for a first version. Describing screens in a prompt is often faster than designing them. Figma becomes more useful later, for store screenshots and for the app icon. The App Store screenshot size guide lists the dimensions both stores currently require.

3. Building the app

ShipNative (free plan)

ShipNative turns a description into a React Native app built with Expo. You describe the app, review a plan, and get working screens you can edit in plain English. The free plan includes 5 credits a week and builds of up to five screens. That’s enough for a focused first version. It isn’t enough for a long edit session, so batch your changes. The 24-hour MVP prompt pack has four-screen prompts written to fit that limit.

Expo Go

Expo Go is a free iOS and Android app that runs your project on a real phone during development. Scan a QR code and the app opens, with no cable, Xcode, or Android Studio. It’s a preview tool: the app runs inside Expo Go, so it isn’t something you can submit to a store. See running your app in Expo Go for the setup, including the free Expo account iPhone needs, and Expo Go vs a development build for when you outgrow it.

Expo EAS

EAS builds the real iOS and Android binaries in the cloud, so you don’t need a Mac to produce an iOS build. The free plan includes 15 iOS and 15 Android builds a month in a lower-priority queue, and over-the-air updates for up to 1,000 monthly active users. A normal development cycle rarely hits the build count. The queue wait is what you’ll notice, usually on the day you need a fix out.

4. Backend, auth, and payments

Supabase

Supabase gives you a Postgres database, authentication, and file storage. The free plan includes a 500 MB database, 50,000 monthly active users, and two active projects. The limit to plan around isn’t size, it’s the pause after one week of inactivity. A demo app you haven’t touched in a while will be asleep when an investor or tester opens it. Compare the options in Supabase vs Firebase for React Native.

RevenueCat

If your app sells subscriptions or in-app purchases, RevenueCat handles receipts, entitlements, and the differences between Apple and Google billing. It’s free until you pass $2,500 in monthly tracked revenue, then charges 1% of tracked revenue. The Expo + RevenueCat setup guide covers the integration.

5. Analytics and crash reporting

PostHog includes 1 million product analytics events and 5,000 session recordings a month for free. A million events sounds like a lot until you track every screen view and tap. Instrument the five to ten events that describe your core loop (signed up, created the first item, came back the next day) and nothing else until you have a question those events can’t answer.

Sentry’s free Developer plan covers 5,000 errors a month for one user, with 30 days of retention. One crash in a loop can use the whole month’s quota in an afternoon, so set up alerts on new issues rather than on volume, and fix repeating errors first.

6. Testing

Maestrois a free, open-source command-line tool for mobile UI tests. You write flows in YAML (“tap Sign in, type email, assert Home is visible”) and run them on a simulator or device. A handful of flows covering sign-up and the core action catches most release-breaking bugs. The paid Maestro Cloud product runs those flows on hosted devices; the CLI is enough to start.

For beta testers, TestFlight is included with the Apple Developer Program and supports up to 10,000 external testers. Each build expires after 90 days, so a long-running beta needs fresh builds. On Android, closed testing tracks in Play Console do the same job. See TestFlight for AI-generated apps for the invite-and-iterate loop.

7. Launch: legal and store listing

Both stores require a privacy policy URL. Termly’s free plan covers one policy, which is all a single app needs. Read what it generates. The privacy policy template for AI-built apps explains which sections depend on the services your app actually uses, such as analytics, crash reporting, and auth.

After launch, the best keyword data is free and already yours: App Store Connect and Google Play Console show the search terms that led people to your listing. Until then, the free ASO keyword tools guide covers what you can use without paying.

Which free tier you’ll outgrow first

For most small apps, the order looks like this:

1. Supabase’s inactivity pause, as soon as you have a demo that needs to be up when someone opens it.
2. Build queue time on EAS, around your first launches and urgent fixes.
3. Sentry’s error quota, the first time a crash ships to real users.
4. Figma’s team file limit, when a second person joins.
5. RevenueCat, PostHog, and EAS Update, only once you have real revenue or real traction. That’s a good problem to have.