Quick checklist
- How many people will use it, and do they need different permissions?
- Does it need to talk to anything you already pay for?
- Is there existing data to bring across, and what state is it in?
- Does a customer ever touch it, or is it staff-only?
- What happens to the business if it stops working for a day?
Ask what custom software costs and you will usually get “it depends”, which is true and useless. It depends on things the person asking cannot be expected to know yet, so the answer gets withheld until they have sat through a meeting.
We would rather just tell you. Here is roughly where things start, and more importantly, what moves the number.
Where things actually start
Our published starting prices are on the pricing page, but the short version:
- A single automation or integration — from $2,500. One repetitive process removed, or two systems you already pay for made to talk to each other.
- A database or internal tool — from $8,500. The spreadsheet everyone is frightened of, turned into something several people can use at once without breaking it.
- A full custom business system — from $25,000. Multiple users, permissions, a real workflow: quoting into jobs into invoices, that sort of thing.
- A paid discovery session — from $850. A small piece of work that produces a realistic scope and range before anyone commits to a build.
Those are floors, not estimates. A $25,000 starting point does not mean your system costs $25,000, it means systems of that shape do not sensibly begin below it.
What actually drives the number
Four things, in roughly this order.
How many people use it, and whether they differ. Software for one person is dramatically cheaper than software for eight, not because of the seats but because the moment two people use something, you need permissions, and someone has to decide who can see what. That question is never as simple as it sounds.
What it has to talk to. A system that stands alone is straightforward. A system that has to stay in step with your accounting package, your calendar and your payment provider is three integrations, and each one has its own quirks, its own failure modes and its own opinions about dates.
The state of your existing data. Bringing across ten years of records is easy if they are consistent and slow if they are not. They are usually not — and finding out which is one of the reasons the discovery session exists.
Edge cases. The main path is often the cheap part. What happens when a job is cancelled halfway, or a customer part-pays, or someone needs to undo something from last month — that is where the hours go. Every business has a handful of these, and they are usually the reason off-the-shelf software did not fit in the first place.
What makes it cheaper
Start smaller than you think you need to. The most expensive projects are the ones specified completely up front, because a good half of what gets specified turns out to be unnecessary once people are actually using the thing. Build the piece that hurts most, use it for a month, then decide what is next with real information.
Buy where buying works. We talk people out of building fairly regularly, and it is not modesty — an established product has already solved edge cases you have not hit yet, for a fraction of what solving them yourself costs. Building earns its place when the way you operate genuinely is not how the off-the-shelf tools assume, or when the actual problem is four tools that should be one.
Bring your data across tidy. Time spent cleaning up a spreadsheet before a migration is cheaper than our time doing the same job.
The cost nobody quotes for
Software is not a purchase, it is a dependency. Things it plugs into change their APIs. Browsers change. Your business changes. A system nobody maintains does not stay still, it slowly stops working.
Budget for that from the start — either an ongoing arrangement or a realistic block of hours each year. Our technology partner retainers start from $2,200 a month, but the number matters less than having one. A build quote that mentions nothing about the year afterwards is not a cheaper quote, it is an incomplete one.
When the honest answer is “don’t”
If the thing costing you time is one process, and a $30-a-month tool does it adequately, buy the tool. If you cannot describe what the software would do in two sentences, you are not ready to build it yet, and a discovery session will save you more than it costs. And if the real problem is that nobody has decided how the business should work, software will not decide it for you — it will just make the confusion faster and more expensive.
The businesses that get the most out of custom software are the ones that already know exactly which twenty minutes of their day they want back.
Bottom line
The build is a one-off; the software is forever. If a quote covers the build and says nothing about the year after it, that is the part that will surprise you.
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