How much does bespoke software cost in the UK? Real ranges, and what drives the price

In the quotes we see, bespoke software development cost in the UK runs from about £5,000 for a small internal tool to £150,000 or more for a full CRM or ERP replacement, and most projects for small and mid-sized businesses land between £10,000 and £60,000 plus VAT. The spread is that wide because a quote is hours multiplied by a rate, and both numbers vary a lot: suppliers assume different amounts of work from the same brief, and UK rates run from roughly £40 an hour for a freelancer to well over £100 an hour at a large consultancy.

So if you have been quoted £8,000 by one firm and £150,000 by another for what you thought was the same system, neither is necessarily wrong. They have priced two different projects. This guide shows where the hours go, what typical projects cost, and how to put quotes side by side so the gap makes sense.

Typical UK price ranges by project type

These ranges come from the quotes we see and from our own pricing. They are not survey data, and a small project with awkward integrations can cost more than a large simple one. All figures exclude VAT.

Two notes on that table. The SaaS row is covered in detail in our guide to SaaS MVP development, including what to leave out of a first release. And before you commission a CRM replacement, read our comparison of custom CRM against off-the-shelf, because for many businesses the cheapest bespoke CRM is the one they never build.

What drives bespoke software development cost

Every item below adds hours. When two quotes are far apart, it is nearly always because one supplier has included several of these and the other has assumed them away.

Scope: screens, rules and exceptions

Developers do not really price features. They price screens, business rules and exceptions. “Staff can raise an invoice” is one line in a brief. In practice it means a form, validation, numbering, part-payments, credit notes, a PDF layout, an email and a rule for what happens when someone edits an invoice that has already been sent. The first version of that list is a day of work. The full version is a week or more.

Integrations

Connecting to Xero, Sage, a courier, a payment provider or an older in-house system is the item most often under-estimated. A well-documented API such as Stripe or Xero might take two to five days to integrate properly, including error handling and retries. An old system with no API, where data has to be exchanged by nightly CSV file, can take three times as long and will need looking after for as long as it runs.

Users, roles and permissions

A tool where every user sees everything is cheap. Add managers who see their own branch only, customers who see their own orders only, and an auditor with read-only access, and each screen needs testing once per role. Five roles does not cost five times as much, but in our experience it can easily add 20 to 30 per cent to the build.

Data migration

Moving ten years of records out of spreadsheets or an old database is rarely a copy and paste. Dates are in three formats, customers are duplicated, and half the postcodes are in the notes field. Budget for at least one trial run and a clean-up pass. On the replacement projects we have seen, migration is often 10 to 20 per cent of the total.

Compliance and security

If the system holds personal data, UK GDPR applies, and it requires a data protection impact assessment before you start any processing that is likely to be high risk, for example health data on a large scale or tracking people’s location or behaviour. The Information Commissioner’s Office publishes the full list. That affects design: access logs, retention rules, encryption, the ability to export or delete one person’s data. Card payments bring PCI DSS into scope, which is why we use hosted payment pages from providers such as Stripe so that card numbers never touch your server. Regulated sectors such as finance and healthcare add their own requirements, and some customers will ask for a penetration test before they sign.

Design

An internal tool can use a standard component library and look perfectly decent. A product that customers pay for, or a portal that carries your brand, needs proper UX work: user flows, wireframes, a visual design and usually a round of testing with real users. That is commonly 10 to 20 per cent of the budget, and it is money well spent when staff will use the screens eight hours a day.

Testing

Testing is the line that disappears from cheap quotes. A sensible allowance is 15 to 25 per cent of development time, covering automated tests on the important rules, manual testing on real devices and a period where your own staff try to break it. If a quote has no testing line, ask where it went.

Hosting and environments

The software needs somewhere to run, a separate staging copy for testing changes, backups that have been restored at least once, and monitoring so that somebody knows when it is down. Setting this up is usually one to three days. Skipping it saves a few hundred pounds and costs far more the first time something goes wrong.

Day rates, hourly rates and fixed prices

UK suppliers charge in three ways, and the method changes who carries the risk.

• Time and materials. You pay for hours or days actually worked. In the quotes we see, freelance developers in the UK commonly charge £300 to £600 a day, small and mid-sized agencies £450 to £900, and large consultancies £1,000 or more. You carry the risk of overrun, but you only pay for what gets built and you can change your mind as you learn.
• Fixed price. The supplier quotes one figure for a written specification. They carry the overrun risk, so they add a contingency for it, commonly 15 to 30 per cent, and every change after sign-off becomes a priced change request. Fixed price works well when the scope really is fixed.
• Fixed price per phase. A paid discovery phase produces a specification, then each phase is quoted separately. This is what we recommend for anything over about £15,000, because nobody can price month six accurately in week one.

Our own rates are published. Custom web development is £60 an hour, mobile apps £70, e-commerce £65 and UI/UX design £55, all plus VAT, with volume discounts of 5 per cent at 10 hours rising to 25 per cent at 100 hours. Hours are bought through our hourly hire page and never expire. At the 100-hour tier, custom development works out at £45 an hour, or £360 for an eight-hour day.

A low rate is not automatically a low price. A senior developer at £90 an hour who has built three booking systems before will often finish in half the hours of a junior at £40 who is working it out as they go. Compare total cost for a defined result, then check the rate.

A worked example: job management for a heating firm

Take an illustrative business: a Leeds heating and plumbing firm with 25 staff, running jobs from a shared spreadsheet and a wall calendar. They want office staff to schedule jobs, engineers to see their day on a phone and capture photos and a customer signature, and invoices to go to Xero without retyping. Three roles: office, engineer, director.

At our rates, development is 300 hours × £60 = £18,000, less the 25 per cent discount for 100 hours or more, which gives £13,500. Design is 40 hours × £55 = £2,200, less 15 per cent for 20 hours or more, which gives £1,870. The project total is £15,370 plus VAT of £3,074, so £18,444 including VAT.

Now price the same 340 hours elsewhere. At eight hours a day that is about 43 days. At an agency day rate of £650 to £850 the bill is roughly £28,000 to £36,000 before any fixed-price contingency. A supplier who assumes no migration, no Xero link, one role and light testing might quote 150 hours and come in under £10,000. A consultancy that adds a project manager, a business analyst and a native iOS and Android app could reasonably reach £80,000. Same brief, four honest prices.

Running costs after launch

The build is the largest single cost, but it is not the last one. Plan for these from the start.

For the heating firm above, a realistic running budget is £60 to £120 a month for hosting and services, plus two to four hours of developer time a month for updates and small changes. Ask every supplier to put a figure on year two. A quote that is silent on it is incomplete.

How to reduce the cost without wrecking the result

Phase it

Build the part that removes the most daily pain first and use it for a month before commissioning the rest. In the example, leaving the Xero link, SMS notifications and most of the reporting to phase two takes about 60 hours out and brings the first release down to about £12,700 plus VAT, and by the time you come back to those features you will know exactly how you want them to work. Phasing has a second benefit: you find out whether you like working with the supplier while the commitment is still small.

Buy the commodity parts

Nobody should be paying for a custom payment system, a hand-written email delivery service or a login system built from first principles. Use Stripe for payments, an established email and SMS provider, the framework’s own authentication, and off-the-shelf accounting. Spend the bespoke budget on the part of your process that no product handles. Sometimes that honest assessment ends with us telling a client to buy a £40-a-month product and not to build anything.

Write a clear brief

Vague briefs get padded quotes, because the supplier has to price the worst case. A good brief lists who the users are, what each one needs to do, what systems it must connect to, how much data exists and what “finished” looks like. Our guide on how to write a website brief is aimed at websites, but the structure carries over directly.

Decide quickly and with one voice

Slow sign-offs and three directors giving conflicting feedback cost real hours. Name one person who can make decisions and give them time in their week to do it.

Where not to save

Do not cut testing, backups or the specification. Do not accept code you cannot access. And be wary of dropping the design work on a system staff will use all day, because a confusing screen costs you a little every time someone opens it.

How to compare quotes

Put the quotes in one spreadsheet and check each against this list. Gaps explain most price differences.

• Is there an hours or days breakdown by feature, or only one total?
• Which integrations are named, and which are “to be confirmed”?
• How many user roles are assumed?
• Is data migration included, and for how many records?
• How much testing is allowed for, and who does it?
• Is design a separate line, and what do you receive?
• Is hosting set-up included, and what are the monthly costs afterwards?
• Who owns the code and the intellectual property once you have paid? Under UK copyright law a contractor keeps ownership unless the contract assigns it to you, so this must be in writing.
• Will the code sit in a repository you control?
• What is the warranty period for fixing defects at no charge?
• How are changes priced, and at what rate?
• Who will actually write the code, and can you speak to them?
• What does maintenance cost in year two?

If one quote is much lower than the others, ask that supplier what they have left out. If one is much higher, ask what they have included that the others have not. Both conversations are worth having, and a supplier who answers plainly is telling you something about how the project will go.

What we would do in your position

If your budget is under £10,000, look hard for an existing product first, then consider a small bespoke tool that covers one process well. Between £10,000 and £50,000, pay for a short discovery phase, get a specification you own, and build in two or three phases. Above £50,000, insist on a discovery phase, a named technical lead and staged payments tied to working software you can log in to.

We are based in London and build custom software for businesses across the UK, at the hourly rates above. If you have a brief, or a pile of quotes that do not agree with each other, send it to us and we will tell you how many hours we think it is and why.

Photo: Patricia Serna via Unsplash