What bespoke software actually costs in the UK

The short answer

Bespoke software in the UK costs from £10,000 for a focused version one. Most of what established teams ask us to scope fits between £10,000 and £50,000, and the number is fixed before the build starts, not discovered after it.

Those are our figures, and they are the same three bands the application form asks about. They are a guide to where a project usually lands, not a menu. What decides the band is the shape of the work, and the next section is about that.

What moves the number

Five things decide where a build lands. None of them is a mystery, and all five show up in the first conversation, which is why we can put a firm range on a build before anyone pays for anything.

• IntegrationsEvery system the software reads from or writes to: the CRM, the accounts package, the till, the payment provider. Each one is real work, and each one is where a cheap quote hides its shortcuts.
• DataWhether data already exists and where. Starting clean is cheap. Moving three years of records out of a spreadsheet or an old tool, with its inconsistencies, is a project inside the project.
• ComplexityBranching rules, calculations, states and exceptions. ‘Approve or reject’ is simple. ‘Approve, unless the value is over £5,000 and the requester is not a director, in which case route to finance’ is not.
• RolesHow many kinds of user, and how different their views are. A portal for customers and a console for your team are two products sharing a database, however similar they look.
• CompliancePersonal data, payment data, health data, children’s data, or a regulator looking on. Each adds work that is invisible in a demo and expensive to retrofit. Section 6 puts numbers on it.
• Not on the list: the designDesign is in every band. A version one that looks like a version one gets ignored by the people it was built for, and adoption is the whole return on the investment.

A worked example. A fit-out contractor wants clients to see programme status, sign off variations and download certificates. One kind of user outside the business, one inside, documents stored in the system, and status updated by hand. That is a £10k to £25k build.

Add a live link to their scheduling tool and Xero so that variations raise invoices automatically, and it is a different project with two integrations and a reconciliation problem, and it moves into the second band.

The mistake to avoid is treating the bands as a discount ladder. Taking a workflow out of scope is not a saving if the workflow is the reason to build. Version one should be the smallest thing that is worth using every day, and then it earns the next piece.

How a build is priced

We do not sell hours. A build is scoped in a blueprint, priced as one fixed figure from that blueprint, and paid in instalments against milestones. You know the number before you commit, and the number does not move unless the scope does.

What ‘from £10k’ means, precisely

It means the smallest fixed-price build we take on is £10,000, and that your build’s price is set in writing from its blueprint.

It does not mean a £10,000 estimate that becomes £18,000 by launch. If something we did not scope turns out to be needed, it is priced in writing before anyone acts on it, and you decide.

Why fixed price rather than day rate

The median contract rate for a senior software engineer in the UK is £525 a day1. The rate is not the problem. The open-ended number of days is.

A day rate moves the risk of estimating onto you: if the work takes longer, you pay more, and you cannot check whether it should have. A fixed price from a blueprint moves that risk to us, where it belongs, because we are the ones who can see the work.

It also changes the incentive. On a day rate, a change request is revenue. On a fixed price, it is a conversation about whether the change is worth having.

What you are paying now

The comparison that matters is not bespoke against nothing. It is bespoke against the workaround you are already paying for, in seats, in tasks and in hours, and the workaround compounds. The full case, with the price rises and the exit costs, is in the own-or-rent guide; this section has the arithmetic.

Off-the-shelf tools are priced per seat per month, and the price rises with the tier that has the feature you actually need. HubSpot’s Sales Hub Professional lists at $90 a seat a month on annual billing2, Airtable’s Business plan at $45 a seat a month3, and Zapier’s Professional plan from $19.99 a month at its lowest task tier, with Team from $694.

None of those is unreasonable for what it does. The problem is arithmetic: a team of twenty on two of them is spending a version-one build every year, and owns nothing at the end.

Then the hours. If two people spend half a day a week each re-keying between systems and chasing status, that is a day a week of salaried time, which at a modest £35,000 salary is £7,000 a year before employer costs, and it does not go away when the team grows. It gets worse.

There is a third cost that rarely makes it into the spreadsheet. Zylo’s 2026 index of company software spend puts the average portfolio at 305 applications, and found that 78% of IT leaders had been hit by unexpected charges for AI features or usage-based pricing in the past year6.

Tools bought to bridge a gap tend to stay bought, and the bill for them is set by someone else.

What it costs to run

Bespoke software runs on the same services a SaaS product runs on, except that the accounts are in your name and the bill is for usage, not for seats. At version-one scale that is a short list.

Two things are missing from that table on purpose. Payment processing is a percentage of what you take, set by the provider, and it is the same whether the software is bespoke or bought. And a support fee is a choice, not a service charge.

Support after launch

Every build ships with a warranty window in which anything that does not do what the specification says is fixed at no cost, whether or not you take support afterwards. After that, support is a fixed monthly fee scoped with the build.

It covers keeping the software working: new phones and browsers, security updates, the tools underneath, monitoring, and someone to call. It does not cover new features, which are always scoped and priced first so you see the number before the work.

Because you own the accounts and the code, ending support changes nothing about the software. It keeps running in your accounts with any developer you choose. That is the point of owning it.

The compliance line

Compliance is the line item most cost guides leave out and most builds trip over. For a UK business handling personal data it is a known quantity, and the numbers are smaller than people fear when they are planned for and larger than anyone likes when they are not.

What is included in every build without asking: data hosted in the UK or London region, row-level access control enforced in the database rather than trusted to the app, an audit history of who changed what, payment details that never touch our servers, and a processor agreement so that the data is yours in law as well as in practice.

What we will not do is claim a certification we do not hold or a compliance regime we have not shipped under. If your data needs one, it is either priced as a line in the blueprint with a named third party, or it is a reason we tell you not to build with us.

Timeline, and how the money moves

A focused version one takes weeks, not quarters. The blueprint takes one to two, the build three to eight, and the dates that neither of us controls, such as an app-store review, are named as such rather than promised.

Payment follows the work. A build is invoiced in instalments against milestones agreed in the blueprint, typically a share on signing that locks the slot, a share when you have working software in your hands, and the balance at launch. Each invoice is for something you can see.

Two rules protect both sides. The code lands in your repository from the first week, so anything paid for is yours whatever happens next. And the plan moves by the delay when a decision or a piece of content arrives late, so a missed date costs days, not money.

In US dollars

We quote US teams in dollars, fixed at the time of the blueprint. As a guide, at the European Central Bank reference rate for 3 September 2026, £1 was $1.355, so £10,000 is about $13,500 and the £25,000 and £50,000 thresholds are about $33,700 and $67,500.

Against the US market that is a senior team at a price US buyers associate with offshore work. Published rate tables put mid-market US custom development firms at roughly $100 to $300 an hour and boutique agencies at $75 to $25017, and at an hourly rate the total is whatever the hours turn out to be, which you learn from the invoice.

The difference is not quality. It is overhead: two founders, no account managers, no office in a city you will never visit, and a price that is fixed before the work starts.

• Working hours overlap the US East Coast morning through early afternoon, and the blueprint call is scheduled to suit you.
• Intellectual property is assigned to you under the agreement, governed by the law of England and Wales unless you need otherwise.
• Every account is in your name from week one, in the region you choose, including a US data region if your customers are there.

When we will tell you not to build

Some calls end with us recommending something other than a build, and we would rather that than the alternative. A build that does not pay for itself is a bad reference and a worse relationship, and the projects worth doing are the ones that earn their money back.

• A tool already fits. If an off-the-shelf product covers ninety percent of the workflow and the missing ten percent is a preference rather than a cost, configure the tool. We will point you at the setting.
• The process is not stable yet. Software fixes a process in place. If the way you work changes monthly, write it down and run it by hand for a quarter first, then build the version that survived.
• Nobody would use it daily. A system used once a month by two people is a spreadsheet with ambitions. The return on custom software comes from removing daily friction.
• The budget is under £10,000. It is not that the work cannot be done. It is that it cannot be done well at a fixed price, and a cheap build that stalls costs more than either option.
• You want an app because competitors have one. A mobile app is the right answer when your customers reach for their phone to do the thing. If they reach for a laptop, build for the laptop.

Questions people ask before a build