Every pricing page for custom software says “get in touch for a quote,” which is correct but not helpful when you are trying to work out whether this is even worth exploring. Here is a more useful starting point.
Rough ranges
These are UK ranges for a first working release, not a finished five-year platform — most of what gets built for a small or mid-sized business fits this bracket:
- A single-purpose internal tool (a spreadsheet replacement, a simple booking system, a basic dashboard): roughly £4,000–£15,000
- A customer-facing portal or booking system with real business logic: roughly £12,000–£35,000
- A multi-part internal platform (CRM plus job costing plus invoicing, for example): roughly £25,000–£70,000+
Anything quoted well outside these ranges is either much smaller than it sounds, or has scope nobody has fully described yet.
What actually moves the number
How many systems it has to talk to. A standalone tool is cheap. The same tool integrated properly with your CRM, accounts and website is not — integration work is routinely underestimated because it is invisible until someone tries to build it.
How well the process is understood before anyone writes code. Projects that start with a real mapping exercise cost less overall, even though that mapping has its own price tag, because rework is the single biggest cost inflator on custom software.
Who is accountable for the exceptions. “Handle every case correctly” costs meaningfully more than “handle the common cases and flag the rest for a person.” Deciding which one you actually need, honestly, changes the price a lot.
Mobile and offline requirements. A tool used at a desk is cheaper to build than the same tool used on a building site with patchy signal. Be specific about where and how it will actually be used.
What tends to be missing from a first quote
- Hosting and ongoing infrastructure costs — usually modest, but rarely in the headline number
- A support or maintenance arrangement after launch — someone has to fix what breaks and build what gets asked for next
- Time for your own team to be involved — discovery and testing need real hours from people who are already busy, and that cost is real even though nobody invoices for it
- A second release — the first release is deliberately the smallest useful thing; almost every project has a second phase within six months of the first going live
Custom vs off-the-shelf, on price alone
Off-the-shelf software usually looks cheaper on day one. The comparison that matters is total cost over two or three years, including licence fees per user, the modules you pay for but do not use, and the manual workarounds a near-fit product leaves behind. That comparison sometimes favours off-the-shelf — when it fits well, buy it — but it is a different sum to the sticker price, and worth doing properly. There’s a longer breakdown of how to make that call in custom software or off-the-shelf.
The number that matters is not what the software costs to build. It is what the current way of working costs to keep running, compared against it.
Getting a real number
A proper estimate needs a proper look at the process it is replacing — which is exactly what a scoping session is for. Henderson Digital’s version of that is a fixed-price Transformation Day at £600, which produces a prioritised, costed roadmap rather than a guess.
