How much does it cost to add social login (Google, Apple, Facebook)?

Ask what it costs to let people sign in with their Google or Apple account and you will usually get a shrug, because the cost to add social login looks trivial from the outside. It is a button. In practice the button is the cheap part, and the real work sits behind it in the account system that button plugs into. For a UK app, adding social login runs from roughly £1,500 for a single provider bolted onto an app that already has accounts, up to around £10,000 for a full sign-in system that handles Google, Apple, and Facebook together. This guide separates the button from the plumbing and shows what actually moves the number.

How much does it cost to add social login?

The cost to add social login is almost entirely a one-off development cost, with no per-login fee from the providers themselves. In the UK, adding one provider to an app that already has a working account system typically costs £1,500 to £4,000, while building a full authentication layer from scratch with Google, Apple, and Facebook, plus account linking, commonly runs £4,000 to £10,000. Google, Apple, and Facebook do not charge you each time someone logs in.

That is the headline that makes social login different from payments. When you add Stripe to an app you pay for the build once and then a fee on every transaction forever. Social login is the opposite shape: you pay for the build, and the providers take nothing per login. The cost that does recur is maintenance, which is smaller but real, and we come back to it below.

Why social login is mostly a one-off cost

The reason there is no ongoing per-login fee is that Google, Apple, and Facebook give away their sign-in software. Each one publishes a free software development kit and uses the open OAuth 2.0 standard, because letting users log in with an account they already trust is good for them too. So the meter that runs on payments simply is not there on authentication. You wire it in once and users sign in for free from then on.

Where an ongoing cost can appear is if you decide not to build authentication yourself and instead use a managed platform such as Auth0 or Firebase Authentication. Those services handle a lot of the security for you and offer a free tier, then charge a monthly amount once you pass it. That is a genuine trade, buying less build cost now in exchange for a running bill later, and it is worth pricing both ways before you commit. For most apps we build, the provider software is free and the only recurring cost is the maintenance of keeping it working.

The hidden cost is the account system, not the button

Here is the part founders miss. Social login is not really a login feature, it is an account feature, and the price reflects whatever account system it has to plug into. If your app already has users, sessions, and a database that knows who is who, adding a Google button is a short job. If it does not, the button forces you to build all of that first, and that is where the hours go.

The thorniest piece is account linking. Picture a user who signs up with Google in January, then comes back in March and taps the Facebook button, because they have forgotten how they joined. Without linking, your app now thinks that is two different people, with two histories and two subscriptions. Handling that cleanly, matching accounts by verified email, merging where it is safe, and warning where it is not, is real engineering that has nothing to do with the login button and everything to do with why a multi-provider build costs more than a single one.

The Apple rule you cannot skip

One platform rule can decide your scope before you have written a line of code. Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines have long included a section, 4.8, that requires apps offering third-party or social sign-in from the likes of Google or Facebook to also offer an equivalent privacy-focused option, and Sign in with Apple is the option that qualifies. In plain terms, if you want the Google and Facebook buttons on an iOS app, you generally need the Apple button too.

That single rule is why so many UK apps end up supporting all three providers rather than the one they actually wanted. It adds build cost, because Sign in with Apple has its own quirks, including users who choose to hide their real email behind a private relay address that your backend has to handle. The exact wording and its exceptions do change, so confirm the current position in Apple’s own App Store Review Guidelines before you scope the work, but plan for the Apple button on iOS as the default rather than the surprise.

What drives the social login cost up

Three things move the number more than anything else. The first is how many providers you support. Each one is its own integration with its own setup, its own developer console, its own review quirks, and its own edge cases, so going from one provider to three is not three times the login button but a real jump in testing and account-linking work.

The second driver is whether the app already has authentication. Adding a provider to an existing account system is cheap; building the account system that social login depends on is most of the cost, and it is easy to mistake one for the other in a quote. The third is the platforms you ship on. A native app on both iOS and Android carries the Apple rule above, plus separate testing on each platform, plus secure handling of tokens on the device, all of which a simple web login avoids. Together these three explain why two social login jobs can differ by the best part of £8,000.

A worked example: adding three providers

Picture a UK app that currently has no accounts at all and wants users to sign in with Google, Apple, and Facebook. To do that properly it needs a backend that can create and store user records, a session system that keeps people logged in securely, three separate provider integrations, Sign in with Apple handled including the private relay email case, and account linking so the same person is never split into three. That is a full authentication layer, and it lands in the £4,000 to £10,000 range rather than the single-provider range, because almost every part of it is a feature in its own right.

Contrast that with an app that already has email and password login working. Adding a single Google button there might be a £1,500 to £3,000 job, because the account system it needs already exists and the work is genuinely just the one integration plus testing. Same feature, very different price, and the difference is entirely about what was already built. This is why a social login line in a quote is meaningless without knowing the state of the app it is going into, a point that runs through our wider guide to how much an app costs to build in the UK in 2026.

Can you add social login yourself?

For the simplest cases, sometimes yes. If you are on a no-code or low-code platform, social login is often a setting you switch on rather than code you write, and the platform handles the provider integrations and the account system underneath. For an early product where you just want people through the door, that can be the right call and cost you almost nothing beyond your existing plan.

The build cost returns the moment you need control over how accounts behave. Once you care about linking a returning user’s providers, storing your own user records, tying sign-in to subscriptions and permissions, and meeting the Apple rule on a native app, you are building authentication properly rather than toggling a switch. That is engineering with your users’ security on the line, and it is where the £1,500 to £10,000 range comes from. The honest rule is the same as with payments: use the easy route to prove people want the product, then budget the proper build once they do.

What to do next

The cost to add social login comes down to one honest idea: the button is cheap and free to run, but the account system behind it is where the money goes. Adding one provider to an app that already has accounts is a £1,500 to £4,000 job, a full sign-in system across Google, Apple, and Facebook with account linking is £4,000 to £10,000, and the providers charge nothing per login either way. Decide early how many providers you truly need, remember the Apple rule if you ship on iOS, and match the build to the account system you actually have.

If you want a straight answer on what social login would cost for your specific app, including whether one provider is plenty or the Apple rule pushes you to three, send us a project brief and we will scope it honestly. And if you are budgeting the other pieces around it, our breakdown of what it costs to add push notifications covers a feature that usually lands on the same list.