What does bespoke software actually cost in the UK?
Nobody publishes bespoke software prices, which makes the whole category feel opaque and slightly suspicious. There is a legitimate reason for it, and there are also ways to work out roughly where you will land before you speak to anyone.
Why there is no price list
Because the same sentence describes wildly different projects. A system to track jobs could mean a single screen with a status field, or a multi-department platform with role-based sign-off, audit trails and integrations. Publishing a figure would mislead one of those two customers badly.
What actually drives cost
- Number of distinct user roles. Each one is a different view, different permissions, more testing.
- Integrations. Someone else's API, their edge cases, their downtime.
- Data migration from whatever you run now, especially if it is messy.
- Compliance or audit requirements, which add work throughout rather than at the end.
- How many people need training, and how disruptive rollout will be.
Notice what is missing: number of screens. People assume that drives price, and it is a weak predictor. Ten simple screens are cheaper than three complicated ones.
Rough shapes of project
Without pretending these are quotes: a focused internal tool replacing one spreadsheet, used by a handful of people, is a small project measured in weeks. A departmental system with multiple roles and real workflow is a medium project measured in months. A full operations platform spanning departments with integrations is a large project that should be phased rather than quoted as one number.
Fixed price versus time and materials
Fixed price protects you from overruns and pushes risk onto the developer, who will price that risk in. Time and materials is cheaper if scope is genuinely clear and more expensive if it is not. For most small businesses, fixed price after a paid scoping phase is the sensible arrangement — you pay a small amount to define the work, then get a real number for the build.
The ongoing costs
- Hosting: modest for most internal systems.
- Maintenance: dependency updates, security patches, occasional fixes.
- Changes: your process will evolve, and the software should follow it.
- Support: decide up front whether that is a retainer or ad hoc.
Where the money is wasted
Building features nobody uses, because they were requested in a workshop and never questioned. Building for a scale you do not have. And commissioning custom software when an off-the-shelf product would have fitted — which is why any developer worth hiring should tell you when that is the case, before quoting.