Straight answers about building software

A focused internal tool that replaces a spreadsheet and a manual process typically lands between £6,000 and £15,000. A departmental system with several user roles, reporting and integrations runs £20,000 to £60,000. A commercial SaaS product starts around £18,000 for a first releasable version. Brochure websites start at £1,800 and larger content or ecommerce sites run £4,000 to £9,000. Everything is quoted as a fixed price once the scope is agreed, and all figures exclude VAT.

Because you are paying for it to be built once rather than sharing the cost with ten thousand other subscribers. The comparison that matters is not licence fee against build fee — it is total cost over five years, including the staff hours spent working around a product that does not quite fit, the per-seat fees as you grow, and the price rise you cannot refuse. Custom usually wins somewhere between year two and year four, and it wins permanently after that.

Fixed price for defined pieces of work, which is what almost every client wants. You agree a scope, we quote one number, and that number does not move unless you change the scope. Ongoing work after launch is either a monthly retainer or a day rate, whichever suits how much you expect to need.

Typically a deposit to start, one or more staged payments tied to agreed milestones, and a final payment on delivery. Nothing is due before you have signed off a written scope with a price on it, and you always know what triggers the next invoice.

Hosting, and support if you want it. Website hosting is £15 to £35 a month, application hosting £45 to £150, and larger platforms are quoted on usage. Support retainers start at £75 a month for a website and £250 for an application. None of it is compulsory — you can host it yourself and maintain it yourself, and we will hand over everything you need to do that.

Then that is our problem, not yours. A fixed price is fixed. The only thing that changes the number is you asking for something that was not in the agreed scope, and in that case we tell you what it costs before we build it, not after.

You do, in full, on final payment. Source code, database, designs, assets and documentation. It is written into the contract and we hand over a repository you control. There is no licence-back arrangement and no clause that lets us reuse your system for a competitor.

No. Hosting and support are separate services you can buy or refuse independently of the build. If you want to host it on your own infrastructure from day one we will build it that way and document the deployment. Lock-in through obscurity is a business model we do not want.

You take the repository and go. Because the code is conventional — mainstream frameworks, standard patterns, real documentation, no exotic in-house abstractions — any competent developer can pick it up. We will also spend a handover call with whoever takes over, at no charge.

The fair question, and the honest answer is that this is exactly why you should insist on owning the code and the repository from the start — with us or anybody else. Your system runs on standard infrastructure with standard tooling, so it keeps running, and anybody can maintain it.

We use modern tooling, including AI assistance, in the same way every serious development team now does — and every line is reviewed, tested and understood by the person responsible for it. What you are buying is engineering judgement about what to build and how it should behave, which is the part that decides whether software is any good.

Web applications in Next.js, React and TypeScript on the front end with Django, Python or Node.js and PostgreSQL behind them. Desktop software in C++ with Qt 6, or Electron where cross-platform reach matters more than raw performance. Everything containerised with Docker and deployed through automated pipelines. We pick mainstream, well-supported technology on purpose — it is what keeps your system maintainable by somebody other than us.

Security is designed in rather than added afterwards: encrypted connections everywhere, hashed credentials, role-based access control, parameterised database access, dependency scanning, and payment handling delegated to certified providers so card data never touches your servers. For systems handling personal data we build to UK GDPR expectations, including retention rules and data export.

Monitoring alerts us, not you. Managed hosting includes uptime checks, error alerting and automated daily backups with tested restores. Clients on an application support retainer get a defined response time for critical faults, including outside office hours.

Yes — and that is a technical outcome, not a marketing claim. Server-rendered pages, correctly sized images, minimal JavaScript, clean semantic structure, structured data, generated sitemaps and canonical tags come as standard. We build for Core Web Vitals from the first commit because retrofitting performance costs several times more than building it in.

Yes. Every handover includes written documentation for administrators, a walkthrough session recorded so new staff can watch it later, and technical documentation for whoever maintains the code. Software nobody understands is software nobody uses.