Why do you think that between 3.5k and 35k is a ridiculous price range? It's not clear the complexity of the app that you are proposing but it's really not such a crazy range. It's the lower end of the range.
I'm a professional mobile app developer working in a medium sized company, and it is not unheard of for the range to go up another order of magnitude, into the hundreds of thousands. If you work on several versions, you could even get to add another zero. When I was working freelance some years ago, the cheapest app I ever made was just over €2k. And I didn't make any money on it when you balance it out.
Put another way, do you value your time? And what price do you put on that? Are you an expert? Can you bring something to a project, the app in this case, that others cannot? Will you actually deliver? Can you be flexible with plans and designs as requirements change, even after release?
In my experience everyone has an app idea, and many of them are good. Some of them are brilliant, but you don't need a brilliant app idea to make money. People mythologise the process and think that it's all about the idea. Well, it's all about the execution.
You need solid execution and the business sense for it, i.e. knowing what to make, when to make it and how to sell it. That's actually something I lack, the business sense, but I know it when I see it, like great art, though I can't paint for example.
I was a bit surprised at how much an entry level native app was. I cannot imagine many businesses being able to afford that type of money starting out. It is a huge barrier to getting started and a huge barrier to getting started experimenting with apps for Steem. Don't get me wrong I understand how much time is put into developing an app and that is where the cost comes from, it was just an eye-opener.
Talking about ideas, I was at an event in Dog Patch Studios last week in Dublin and a speaker at the event made a great point.
When you are a startup you have lots of ideas but 90% of them are not what your customers will want. It is important to focus on the 10% that your customers will use early on and not spend your time working on the 90% that they dont.
I don't agree, I think that any business who feel they can't afford a few thousand Euro to invest into something as important as an app probably hasn't got their priorities in order.
That is of course only if you need an app. The app rush seems to be cooling off slightly so if your app is just a glorified website, stick to the website and make it adaptive at least, or perhaps even a progressive web app if you can.
If your business is actually centred around the app and you can't raise a few grand, there's a problem there much bigger than the capital. At that point you do it yourself probably, as you have done. But it could easily work out more expensive if you could be doing something more productive with your time.
Your comment on startups, I completely agree with that one. I fell into that trap myself once upon a time with my own fledgling company, now gone the way of the dodo. Lessons learned the hard way!