What does developing custom software or an ERP cost?
What it costs
Most software companies answer this with “custom quote”. That is true and still useless: the person asking does not want a price, they want to decide whether it is worth sitting down at all.
We describe how a quote comes about, and how what we sell differs.
Why is there no published price?
Because no two of the things we build are alike. The same sentence, “turn emails into orders”, is three weeks of work at one company and three months at another, and the difference is not our decision: it belongs to the systems already in place.
A published price in that situation is either high enough to scare everyone off, or low enough that it needs explaining afterwards. Both are worse than saying what it depends on.
What the field sells, and what we sell
Most of the Hungarian field sells a fixed-price entry product: an audit, a workshop or a monthly package. That is a good offer, because the decision is small, and if that is exactly what you need, it is the one to take.
We sell something else, which is why the price looks different. Our entry point is a conversation, then a survey, and the fixed price is set after the survey, phase by phase. A fixed entry fee cannot tell you that in advance, and we would rather not publish a number we have to explain away later.
How does an offer come about?
In three steps, and each one ends with something you can hold. If we stop after any of them, what has been produced so far stays yours.
- 01
Conversation
An hour about the process that hurts today. This is where it becomes clear whether there is a system problem behind it at all. Often enough there is not, and we say so.
at the end: one sentence on what is worth building, or that it is not
- 02
Survey
Mapping the existing system and the process. This is where the things that double an estimate come out: the undocumented integration, the hand-kept spreadsheet in the middle of the flow, the system nobody has the password to any more.
at the end: a written specification, split into phases, priced per phase
- 03
Phases
Not one big delivery at the end, but working pieces one after another. At the end of each phase something runs in production: if we stop there, the work so far is still yours, and it still works.
at the end: a live, running piece of functionality, per phase
What pushes it up, what pulls it down?
This section is not written yet. What exactly moves our price is knowledge that could be filled in with nice-sounding sentences, but a page like this gets quoted back at you, and then it becomes a promise. It stays empty until it is accurate.
When do we say no?
Fairly often. If an off-the-shelf product covers the job, or if you want a website chatbot, we are not the right answer, and we say so in the first conversation rather than in the quote.