How much does custom software cost? Real numbers, and what changes them.
Search this question and you will find a hundred articles saying somewhere between twenty thousand and three hundred thousand pounds. That is not a range. It is a refusal to answer. Here are actual figures, what moves them, and how to tell whether a quote is serious.
The short version
Most custom software is one of three shapes, and the shape matters far more than the feature list.
| What you need | First version | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| An internal tool or dashboard | £2,500 | £2,500 – £8,000 |
| A portal or multi-role system | £6,000 | £6,000 – £18,000 |
| A product MVP | £8,000 | £8,000 – £25,000 |
Those are our published numbers, not a teaser before a sales call. UK agencies typically quote two to five times that for the same scope, and offshore teams quote in dollars for something you cannot visit. The full list of what we charge, including automation and AI work, sits on the pricing page.
1. Why two quotes for the same brief can differ by ten times
An £8,000 quote and a £60,000 quote for the same description can both be honest. The difference is rarely the code. It is the structure of the business writing the quote.
The day rate. A city agency bills £700 to £900 a day. A senior freelancer bills £350 to £500. Identical work, different overheads, and you are paying for the overheads.
The team size. An agency puts a project manager, a designer, two developers and a tester on your build. You pay for every one of them. A small studio puts one or two people on it and the same software comes out.
The discovery phase. Some agencies sell four weeks of discovery before any software exists. On a genuinely complex system that can be worth it. On a dashboard it is a way of billing a month before writing a line.
How the risk is priced. A large agency prices in the chance your project goes wrong. A small one prices in the chance it goes well. Neither is dishonest. They are different bets.
2. What drives the cost, and what does not
The number of features on your list matters far less than these five things. This is where a serious conversation starts.
How many systems it has to talk to. One is straightforward. Five, each with its own login and its own way of sharing data, is where the hours live.
Whether the data is clean. Moving tidy data is a task. Moving eight years of spreadsheets that disagree with each other is a project in itself, and it has to happen before anything useful can be built on top.
Who needs access. One type of user is simple. Six roles with different permissions, approvals and visibility is real work, and it is the part people forget to budget for.
How much can go wrong. Software that displays information is cheap to build. Software that moves money, triggers legal obligations or holds personal data needs testing, review and an audit trail. That difference is larger than any feature list.
How certain the requirements are. A process that is written down and stable is fast to build. A process that lives in one person's head takes longer to understand than to code.
3. Why ours are lower
We use modern AI-assisted development, which cuts the hours a build takes. A dashboard that took three weeks to hand-code in 2020 takes days now. That is not a shortcut on quality. It is the same software, produced faster, by the person you spoke to.
We also skip the layers that exist to serve the supplier rather than the client. No account manager relaying messages. No weekly status deck. No discovery document that restates your own brief back to you in a nicer font.
We would rather do ten projects at a fair price than two at an agency price. That is the whole commercial model, and it is why the numbers on this page are publishable.
4. The first version, and why it decides the price
This is the biggest lever on cost, and the one most people get wrong.
A first version does one job end to end. It runs within weeks. It costs a fraction of the full vision, and it tells you things a specification cannot: whether the process works that way in practice, which parts people use, and what belongs in the second version.
A full build does everything at once. It takes months, costs multiples, and carries the risk that you have confidently built the wrong thing.
Almost everything we quote is scoped as a first version. If someone quotes you for the entire vision in one go, ask what the smallest useful piece would cost instead. The answer tells you a lot about how they work.
5. When custom software is the wrong answer
Often, it is. If a mature product already fits your process, buy it and spend the difference on something else. If a workflow and a spreadsheet would solve it, do that first. If the process has never been written down, write it down before you commission anything.
Custom software earns its place when the process is genuinely yours, when no product fits how the work runs, or when the missing piece is an interface nobody sells. That is a narrower set of cases than most quotes suggest, and we will say so when yours is not one of them.
6. How to compare two quotes properly
Ask every supplier the same five questions. A quote that cannot answer them is a number, not a plan.
- What exactly is in the first version, and what is deliberately left out?
- Who does the work, and will we ever meet them?
- What happens if it takes longer than quoted?
- What do we own at the end, and can we take it to another developer?
- What does the second version usually cost?
The last one is the most revealing. Anyone can price the first build. Hardly anyone can tell you what the second one costs, because that requires having done it before.
7. Where this fits
If you are still deciding whether you need custom software at all, automation, AI or custom software walks through choosing the smallest route that solves the problem. If you already know software is the answer, what we build covers the shapes it usually takes, and custom software in Lancashire covers working with us locally.
QUESTIONS WE GET ASKED
Why is your pricing lower than other agencies?
Two reasons. We use AI-assisted development, which cuts the hours a build takes, and we skip the agency layers that serve the supplier rather than the client. No account managers, no status decks, no discovery document that restates your own brief back to you. The saving goes to you.
Do you charge by the hour or a fixed price?
Fixed price for a scoped first version, agreed before any code is written. You know what it costs and what is included. If the scope changes, we re-quote that change rather than quietly billing more hours.
What if we do not know exactly what we need?
That is the normal starting point. We map the process with you, agree the smallest version that would prove useful, and price that. You do not need a specification before the first conversation.
Can we start smaller than a full build?
Yes, and we usually recommend it. Most first versions land between £2,500 and £8,000 and run within two to four weeks. A smaller start tells you more than a larger plan, and it costs less to be wrong.
A GOOD FIRST CONVERSATION
Bring the process, not a specification. We will tell you what the smallest useful version costs, and whether it is worth building at all.
Talk through the problem