A Rork alternative for native iOS, without the $200 Max tier

Most people who search for a Rork alternative are really searching for a Rork Max alternative, because Max is the tier where native iOS lives. It is worth being precise about what it is.

Rork Max starts at $200 a month. Rork's documentation describes it as "Everything in Rork Pro, plus native iOS and the rest of the Apple devices" — iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Vision Pro. Their FAQ is equally clear about the output: "Rork Max uses SwiftUI, Apple's own native framework, compiled with Xcode, the same toolchain behind every app in the App Store."

That is a real native app. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and any comparison page telling you Rork Max produces a web wrapper is describing something that does not exist.

Three things about Max are worth knowing before you pay for it.

The $200 is for 1,000 credits, not for unlimited use. Rork's tiers run $200 for 1,000 credits, $500 for 2,500, $900 for 5,000 and $1,800 for 10,000. Rork defines a credit as "a unit of AI compute, roughly one request where Rork builds or edits your app." Divide the entry tier and each build-or-edit request costs twenty cents. That is arithmetic on two numbers Rork publishes itself, not a criticism.

You cannot top up. Rork's FAQ states: "There is currently no way to buy additional credits separately." If you run out mid-project, the documented options are to move up a whole tier or "wait until your credits reset on the monthly anniversary of your first purchase." On Max the next tier up is $500.

A Max app is iOS-only. Their FAQ: "Rork Max apps are iOS-only and cannot be published to Google Play." So the $200 tier is not the tier that gives you both platforms in one app — it is the tier that gives you Apple.

Modaal builds the same native SwiftUI, compiled through the same Xcode, on a free plan with one active project and no cap on prompts. Pro is €9 a month billed annually — €15 monthly — and adds unlimited projects, iOS and Android together, and App Store distribution.

Not for new iOS projects, and this is the single most out-of-date claim in circulation about Rork. Their own documentation says it plainly: "Rork used to build Expo (React Native) apps. Internal benchmarks showed the agent writes better Swift apps, so we switched."

New Rork projects on Max are Swift and SwiftUI. Existing Expo projects still build and publish, but you cannot create new ones. If you are reading a comparison article that describes Rork as a React Native tool and stops there, it was written against a version of the product that no longer exists — and there are several of those ranking well right now.

So the old argument, native code versus a JavaScript wrapper, does not separate these two products any more. We are not going to run it. The differences that survive are commercial and structural: what native iOS costs, whether your work is metered, and where the project lives.

One wrinkle worth keeping straight, because Rork's two pages describe it differently: the FAQ says "Rork Pro uses React Native and Expo" while the subscriptions page says Rork Pro delivers "Native Android apps with Kotlin + Compose." The Max tier is unambiguously SwiftUI. The Pro tier, we genuinely cannot tell you.

The money is not really the point, so let us deal with the money first and then get to what actually matters.

Rork Max at $200 includes 1,000 credits. A credit is "roughly one request where Rork builds or edits your app." Twenty cents a request. For most people that is not an expensive tool — it is a reasonable tool with an unusual meter.

The meter is the problem. When a build breaks and you need six attempts to work out why, a metered tool turns every attempt into a small decision about whether to spend one. Six attempts is $1.20, which is nothing, and you will still hesitate on the fourth. Building software has enough friction without adding a tiny financial question to the moment you are already stuck. And because Rork's FAQ confirms there is "currently no way to buy additional credits separately," the hesitation gets sharper as the month goes on — the meter you are watching is one you cannot refill.

Modaal does not meter. You bring an agent you already pay for — Claude, Codex, Gemini, Copilot, Cursor, OpenCode and several others are supported — and authenticate it with your existing subscription. Modaal orchestrates it and charges a flat seat. If a feature takes forty iterations, it takes forty iterations, and the fortieth costs what the first did.

The honest caveat, and it is a real one: if you do not already subscribe to an AI assistant, Modaal is not free. You are paying for two things instead of one. Rork's bundled model is genuinely simpler for someone starting from zero, and if that is you, the credit meter may be a fair trade for a single bill.

With Modaal there is no export step, because there is nothing to export from. Modaal is a macOS app that drives Xcode on your own machine. The project is a normal Xcode project in a normal folder on your own disk, from the first build. Open it in Xcode without Modaal running. Add Swift packages. Point your own CI at it. Hand it to a contractor. Modaal is the thing that helped you write it, not the place it lives.

Rork's position is reasonable and clearly stated: "Paid users own all generated code," exported through a two-way GitHub integration so you can edit locally and sync changes back. Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it. Export requires a paid plan, so the free tier gives you no way out at all. And Rork's export documentation does not specify the exact project format you receive — so if opening the result directly in Xcode matters to you, test that before you commit to a year.

We have seen it asserted elsewhere that Rork locks your projects when a subscription ends. We are not repeating that, because Rork's documentation does not say it and we could not verify it. If it matters to your decision, ask them.

Rork builds on its own machines and submits to App Store Connect for you. Their docs are explicit: "you do not need Xcode, a Mac, or any other build account." You sign in with your Apple Developer credentials, stay present for the two-factor code, and the build appears in App Store Connect.

If you are on Windows, a Chromebook or a Linux laptop, that is not a convenience — it is the entire product, and Modaal is not an option for you at any price. Modaal builds through Xcode and Xcode requires macOS. No amount of comparison-page framing closes that gap, so we are not going to try.

Rork has also shipped something genuinely novel: Rork Max as an iPhone app, for building and publishing from a phone. That is a real capability and nobody else on this list has it. One wrinkle if you go that route — the cloud build path needs no Mac, but installing to a physical device through the Rork Max app requires a one-time setup step on a Mac with Chrome or Edge. The "no Mac needed" claim is true of the cloud path and not of the on-device install path.

Any competent agent can produce a working screen. The question that decides whether a project survives is what the codebase looks like after fifty features have been added by something that does not remember last week.

Modaal scaffolds an explicit architecture up front and holds the agent to it. The production template uses RIBs — Uber's module pattern — giving you an explicit module tree, protocol boundaries between every module, and a navigation tree that is explicit in the router hierarchy. The quick-prototype template uses MVVM instead, keeping the module structure small enough that view models stay unit-testable.

One warning, because you should know it before you pick rather than after: migrating from MVVM to RIBs is a full rewrite, not a refactor. Choose the production template if there is any chance this becomes real.

There is also a Plan toggle. With Plan on, the agent produces a structured feature spec without writing code, and for new projects it first researches the architectural approach, confirms the key decisions with you, and writes a PRD documenting what the app does and what it is deliberately not doing yet. Then you turn Plan off and it implements against that spec, running a build-and-fix loop through Xcode after each step.

Rork's documentation does not describe an equivalent architectural commitment. That is an absence in their docs, which is not the same as an absence in their product — but if a stated architecture matters to you, only one of these two tools publishes one.