For most of the last decade, the quote for a production-grade native ecommerce app started at $150,000 and climbed from there. Two engineering teams, two codebases, two release cycles — one in Swift for iOS and one in Kotlin for Android. The six-figure price tag was not padding; it reflected real dual-stack labor. That math started to break in 2025 and is fully broken in 2026. A small group of AI app builders now emit native Swift and Kotlin from a single prompt, and one — Sketchflow.ai — does it alongside the web React storefront from the same source. The question for any ecommerce founder in 2026 is no longer "can I afford a native app" — it is "at which GMV stage does the ROI flip from negative to positive." This guide runs the numbers stage by stage. TL;DR — Key Takeaways A hand-coded native ecommerce app still costs $150K–$500K to build in 2026, but AI-generated native apps from tools like Sketchflow.ai and FlutterFlow have collapsed the build cost to three or four figures.…