The honest answer is that most custom business systems we build in Scotland land between £3,000 and £15,000 to build, and then cost from £150 a month to run. A simple app that does one job well sits at the bottom of that. A system that several people use every day to run the business sits nearer the top.
That is a wide range, so this guide explains what moves a project up and down it, and how to work out roughly where yours would sit before you speak to anybody.
What you are actually paying for
Almost nobody needs software written from scratch any more. The frameworks, the hosting and the payment tools all exist. What you are paying for is somebody working out exactly how your business runs, then building the shortest path through it, and staying with it afterwards while you change your mind about things.
That last part is the bit people underestimate. The first version of any system is a guess. It becomes useful in the three months after launch, when the people using it tell you what is wrong with it. A price that covers the build and then leaves you on your own is usually the expensive option, because the system quietly stops matching how you work and everyone drifts back to spreadsheets.
The three things that decide the price
How many people touch it, and in how many roles. One person entering jobs is straightforward. An office manager raising work, engineers updating it on their phones and a director looking at the numbers is three different views of the same data, and that is what takes the time.
What it has to talk to. A system that stands on its own is cheaper than one that has to keep your accounts package in step. Every integration is somebody else’s rules to follow, and their rules change without asking you.
Whether money moves through it. Taking deposits, raising invoices or handling payroll data all bring compliance with them. That is not difficult work, but it is careful work and it needs testing properly.
Roughly what things cost
A single-purpose tool, £3,000 to £5,000. One job, done properly, for a small team. A booking form that quotes on the spot and takes a deposit. A check-in system that replaces a paper sheet. These are quick to build because the scope is genuinely small, and they usually pay for themselves in admin time inside a year.
A working system, £5,000 to £10,000. This is where most of our work sits. Several roles, a proper record of jobs or customers, and reporting that means somebody stops keeping a private spreadsheet. The M8 recruitment CRM is a good example of the shape: it replaced spreadsheets across an agency and gave the team a phone app for the parts they do while they are out.
A system the business runs on, £10,000 upwards. Work orders, scheduling, engineers in the field, invoicing at the end of it. The Montgomery work-order system is this kind of build. When something is the spine of the operation it is worth spending properly on, because every hour it saves is an hour saved every week for years.
On top of the build there is a monthly fee from £150. That covers hosting, support, unlimited changes and regular catch-ups, and the changes part is deliberate. We would rather you asked for the small improvement than lived with the annoyance.
Why the monthly model usually wins
Plenty of agencies quote one large number and disappear at launch. It looks cheaper on the day you sign and it rarely is. Two years later the business has changed, the software has not, and you are paying somebody else to start again.
We split it instead. There is an onboarding fee to fund the build, invoiced in stages as the work reaches each point, and then a single monthly fee that keeps the thing alive and moving. It is a smaller cheque up front and it keeps us on the hook for whether the system still fits in year three.
How to work out whether it is worth it
Do the sum on hours, not on features. Count the hours a week your team spends copying things between places, chasing information that already exists somewhere, or fixing what got typed in wrong. Multiply by what those hours cost you. Most businesses that come to us are losing somewhere between five and fifteen hours a week to admin that should not exist, and at that rate a £6,000 system pays for itself well inside the first year.
The second return is harder to put a number on and often bigger. When the information is in one place and it is current, people make faster decisions and fewer wrong ones. Quotes go out the same day. Nothing gets missed because it was on a note in somebody’s van.
What makes a project cost more than it should
Building for a business nobody has watched work. If nobody has sat with the people who will use the thing, the first version will be wrong in expensive ways.
Trying to do everything at once. The cheapest route to a system that runs a business is to build the part that hurts most, use it for a month, and then build the next part knowing what you learned.
Paying for a rebuild you did not need. Quite often the answer is not a new system at all. Sometimes it is joining up two things you already pay for. We will tell you when that is the case, because a small job done honestly is worth more to us than a large one that disappoints.
Getting a real number for your project
A guide can only get you a range. A real figure needs somebody to understand what you do, and that is usually a half hour conversation rather than a form.
If you want to talk it through, we quote a set price rather than an hourly rate, so you know the number before anything starts. You can read more about how we approach custom software and apps, see where a system fits into wider business digitisation, or look through our FAQ for the questions people usually ask next.
