# Android Studio pricing

Last confirmed on the vendor's page: 2026-10-03. Source: https://developer.android.com/studio. Confidence: medium.

| Plan | Per month | Unit | Billing | On the vendor's page |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Free | Free |  |  |  |

## Hidden costs and limits

- Google Play takes a 15% commission on the first $1M in annual revenue, then 30% above that. For subscription apps, the commission drops to 15% after 12 months of continuous subscription. This is the real cost of the Android ecosystem
- Firebase free tier (Spark plan) is generous but limited: 1GB Firestore storage, 10GB/month bandwidth, 2M Cloud Function invocations. Production apps with meaningful traffic will quickly hit these limits and move to the Blaze pay-as-you-go plan
- Build times on large projects can be significant. While Android Studio is free, developer time waiting for Gradle builds is a real cost, powerful hardware (32GB+ RAM, fast SSD) is effectively required for productive development on large codebases
- The Android Emulator requires hardware acceleration (Intel HAXM or AMD Hypervisor).
- App signing and distribution via Google Play requires a signed APK/AAB. While signing itself is free, managing signing keys, upload keys, and Play App Signing enrollment adds operational overhead
- Android Studio updates are frequent (quarterly stable releases) and can break build configurations, especially with AGP (Android Gradle Plugin) version requirements. The upgrade treadmill costs developer time even though the software is free

## Cite

Toolradar, verified 2026-10-03, https://toolradar.com/tools/android-studio/pricing

Full page: https://toolradar.com/tools/android-studio/pricing. JSON: https://toolradar.com/tools/android-studio/pricing.json. Report an error: https://toolradar.com/openapi.json