What bespoke software actually costs, and what drives the price

Why nobody publishes a price

Bespoke software is priced like an extension, not like a laptop. Two businesses can ask for “a system to manage our orders” and mean jobs a factor of ten apart, because one means a shared order book with a decent search and the other means pricing rules, stock allocation, three integrations and a customer login.

That is not evasion, and it does not mean you have to go in blind. The variables are knowable, and most of them are things you already know about your own business.

What moves the number

Five things account for most of the difference between a small quote and a large one.

• How many processes. One process, done properly, is a project. Five processes are five projects, and they usually want doing in order rather than at once.
• How many rules. Pricing, discounts, approvals and anything with the word “except” in it. A rule you can write in one line is cheap; a rule that lives in one person’s head and has fourteen exceptions is where the time goes.
• How much it has to talk to. Every integration — accounts package, supplier system, website, payment provider — is work, and a fair chunk of it is discovering how the other end actually behaves rather than how its documentation says it behaves.
• How much data comes with you. Clean data in one spreadsheet is a morning. Fifteen years of history across four systems, with duplicates and three spellings of the same customer, is a phase of its own. See moving a process off spreadsheets.
• Who has to use it, and where. Five office users on desktops is one thing. Adding people on phones in a yard, customers logging in from outside, or roles that must not see each other’s figures, all add real work.

The payback arithmetic

Do this before you talk to anyone, including us. It takes ten minutes and it is the single most useful number in the conversation.

1. Pick the process that annoys you most.
2. Count the hours a week it consumes across everyone who touches it. Be honest about the chasing and the re-keying, not just the obvious admin.
3. Multiply by a loaded hourly cost for those people — salary plus employer’s NI and pension, not the headline wage.
4. Multiply by 46 working weeks.

Say two people each lose six hours a week to it. At a loaded cost of £22 an hour, that is twelve hours, £264 a week, a shade over £12,000 a year — for one process, before you count the errors, the late invoices or the order that got missed. Now put your quote next to that figure and the decision stops being about whether software is expensive.

Two cautions. Automation rarely removes 100 per cent of a task, so discount your saving sensibly — halving it is a fair first pass. And the saving is usually not a redundancy; it is capacity you get back, which only counts if there is something better for those hours to go to.

How to make it cost less

• Start with one process. The narrower the first phase, the sooner it is live and the more accurate every later estimate becomes.
• Separate the must from the nice. Half of a first specification is usually things nobody misses once the system exists. Prototypes flush those out while changing your mind is still free.
• Do not gold-plate the edge cases. The order that happens twice a year can stay manual. Building for it can cost more than the exception ever will.
• Sort your data before migration, not during. Deduplicating customers is cheaper as an afternoon of your own admin time than as billable development.
• Use standard components where they fit. Payments, email, accounts: there is no value in building what already exists reliably. The value is in the part that is yours.

Reading a quote properly

A quote worth having tells you these things without being asked:

• what is in the phase and, specifically, what is not;
• what it assumes about your data and the systems it must talk to;
• what happens to the price if those assumptions turn out wrong;
• what you will be able to use, and roughly when;
• what it costs to run and support afterwards;
• who owns what at the end — see who owns bespoke software.

A day rate on its own tells you almost nothing. A cheap day rate against a vague scope is the most expensive quote on the table, and the second invoice is where you find out.

The running cost

Software is not a capital purchase you make once. Budget for hosting, backups, security updates and the changes the business will inevitably want in year two — that is what keeps a system from quietly rotting into the thing everyone works around. It should be a modest, predictable line rather than a surprise, and it should be quoted up front alongside the build.

If you want a real figure for your own process rather than a framework, the free process review is thirty minutes and ends with a straight answer, including “this is not worth building” when that is the honest one.