Is Ionic mobile application free to build for production level?

Question

I am in a confused situation please help me providing the valuable information. I want to learn ionic2 . But it seems I need to pay to build production level apps. I am confused with the pricing module.

Is it possible to build an eCommerce store mobile App version which will retrieve data from my website version's where I have APIs to get data from the database and show the data in my ionic application. Does it cost to built such apps and distribute in App Store? What things I must need from them? Or when do I need to pay for the apps?

Thank you.

Answer 1

Ionic is 100% free, the only things you can pay for in Ionic are themes and other things from the Ionic market. But in general building an Ionic application is free.

For the pricing of uploading an app to a store (being it Apple or Android) you need to create a developer's account and check the pricing, i can't say it's equal to every country, but in Brazil it's something about US$25.00 (One time fee)for Google Play Store and US$99.00 per year for Apple Store.

In other cases there's services you can pay to use, like premium accounts and paid services of Firebase, Amazon, Microsoft Azure, etc.