What drives the cost
- Who uses it. Staff only is simpler than customers logging in. Several kinds of users with different permissions add more.
- What it connects to. Payments, accounting, calendars, email and text messages, your existing systems. Each integration is real work and something to keep running.
- Money. Taking payments, subscriptions, deposits, refunds and tax adds care and testing.
- Data. Importing years of records from an old system, reports, exports.
- Phones. A web app that works well on a phone is one thing; native iPhone and Android apps in the stores are more.
- Rules. Health, legal or financial data comes with requirements that shape the whole build.
What our projects start at
Our custom software and app projects start at $15,000, and every quote is a fixed price in writing after a planning call, with the scope listed. Smaller tools that sit on a website we build, such as an online booking flow or a quote form that prices itself, can come in lower as part of that site.
Keeping the first version affordable
- Start with the one job that costs you the most time or money today.
- Use off-the-shelf tools for the parts that aren’t special to you (payments, email sending, accounting) and connect to them.
- Launch to a few real users, then add what they actually ask for.
- Put ongoing costs in the plan from the start: hosting, monitoring, updates and support.
Ongoing costs
Software isn’t done at launch. Hosting, security updates, the services it connects to and small changes all cost something every month. Ask for that number before you start, not after.
Written by Nikita Huttenlocher, founder and lead engineer at Huttenlocher Technologies, a web design and software company in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.