Costs and Return on Investment
The real question isn't what custom software costs — it's what your current situation is costing you
Most businesses considering custom software focus on the upfront investment. It's a natural instinct, but it's usually the wrong place to start. The more useful question is what the status quo is actually costing — in staff time, in software licences for systems that only do part of the job, in errors that come from moving data between systems by hand, and in the opportunities that never get pursued because the tools can't support them.
When you add those up honestly, custom software often looks considerably less expensive than it first appeared.
What we typically see
A professional services firm was spending £24,000 a year on various software subscriptions. Their staff were spending around 25 hours a week managing data between those systems — approximately £18,000 in salary time annually. Their custom solution required a £35,000 investment and saved them £38,000 in the first year alone. It has continued to save them money every year since.
A wholesale business invested £45,000 in a custom inventory and order management system. Order processing time dropped by 75% and they eliminated around £52,000 in annual costs related to inventory inefficiencies and manual processes. The investment paid for itself in ten months.
These aren't exceptional cases — they're fairly typical of what happens when software is built around how a business actually works rather than the other way around.
How we approach the investment conversation
We don't publish pricing, because the cost of a project depends entirely on what it needs to do. What we will do is have an honest conversation about what you're currently spending, where the inefficiencies are, and what a realistic return might look like before anything gets commissioned. If the numbers don't stack up, we'll tell you.
For projects where budget is a constraint, phased development is often the right approach — building the highest-value elements first, so the early returns help fund the later phases. We've seen this work well for businesses that know what they need but want to manage the investment carefully rather than committing to everything upfront.
A word on the cost of the wrong decision
The hardest costs to quantify are the ones that come from making the wrong call — committing to a platform that can't scale, integrating systems that turn out to be incompatible, or rebuilding something from scratch two years later because the first attempt wasn't properly scoped. Those situations are far more expensive than the original investment, and far more disruptive.
It's one of the reasons we put so much emphasis on the scoping and consultancy work before anything gets built. Getting that right isn't a cost — it's the thing that makes the investment worthwhile.
Ready to run the numbers?
If you'd like to understand what your current setup is genuinely costing you, and whether custom software would represent a sound investment, that's exactly what a discovery call is for.
