Pricing · Nigeria
What a web application actually costs to build in Nigeria
“How much does it cost?” is the first question every buyer asks and the one most studios refuse to answer. We publish our starting figures, so this piece is the reasoning behind them: what genuinely moves a build quote, what should not, and how to tell whether an estimate you have been handed is serious.
Our published floors, for context
We publish these because hiding them wastes everybody’s time. A buyer who cannot afford the work should find that out in ten seconds rather than after three sales calls.
| What you get | Starting from |
|---|---|
| Website or landing page | ₦600,000 |
| Custom web application | ₦2,000,000 |
| Mobile app, iOS and Android | ₦4,000,000 |
| SaaS product | ₦8,000,000 |
Those are floors for the smallest useful version of each thing. The rest of this article is about why a real quote lands above or below them.
What genuinely moves the number
How many kinds of user there are
A system with one kind of user is dramatically simpler than one with five. Every additional role means permissions that must be designed, tested and enforced on the server, not just hidden in the interface. If an administrator, a manager, a field agent and a customer all see different things, that is real work, and it is the work most likely to be underestimated.
How many outside systems you must talk to
Each integration is its own small project. A payment provider with good documentation is a few days. A partner system with an undocumented API, or one that only exports spreadsheets, can take longer than the entire application around it. In Nigeria this usually means Paystack or Flutterwave, plus whatever accounting or inventory tool the business already runs.
The state of your existing data
Migration is where timelines die. Moving historical records out of spreadsheets sounds trivial until you find three spellings of the same customer, dates stored as text, and two records that are plainly the same person. Cleaning that up is unglamorous, necessary work, and it is often 20 to 30 percent of a project.
How much reporting is expected
A dashboard showing counts is quick. Reports that need to reconcile against money, or that finance will use to file, need definitions agreed in writing before anyone writes code. Getting two people to agree on what “active customer” means is frequently the longest part of a reporting requirement.
Whether it has to work on a bad connection
This one matters more here than in most markets. If your users are on mobile data with intermittent coverage, the application has to handle a submission that fails halfway, a refresh mid-checkout, and a duplicate payment attempt. Designing for that is a real difference in architecture, and worth every naira if your users are outside a major city.
What should not move the number much
- The framework. React or otherwise is our decision and it barely changes your cost. Anyone charging a premium for a particular technology is charging you for their preference.
- How many screens there are. Ten variations of a list and detail view are not ten times the work of one.
- Whether it says AI on it. If the feature is genuinely a model call, price it as the feature. If it is a lookup table with an AI label, you are paying for the label.
- Branding and visual polish. Real work, but small next to permissions, integrations and data.
How to read an estimate
The number matters less than what surrounds it. Four things to look for:
- Is it fixed or hourly? Hourly work carries all the risk of an unclear scope and none of the incentive to finish. If a studio cannot fix a price, the scope is not defined yet.
- What is excluded? Hosting, third-party fees, app store charges, SMS and payment processing are real recurring costs. A quote that omits them is incomplete rather than cheap.
- What triggers a change order? Scope will change. A serious studio says in advance how that is handled and what it costs.
- Who owns the code? If this is not answered with “you do”, stop there and ask why.
Watch for the reverse problem too. A quote far below everyone else usually means the scope was not understood, or the work will be done by someone learning on your budget. Both cost more than paying properly the first time.
The costs that continue after launch
Build cost is the beginning, not the total. Budget separately for hosting, payment processing fees, SMS and email, domain and certificates, and some level of ongoing maintenance. A system nobody maintains degrades quickly, and the fixes cost more than the maintenance would have.
We would rather you plan for this openly. A project that is well-maintained at a modest monthly cost is a better outcome than one that is rebuilt every two years.
How to get a real number
You do not need a specification document. You need to describe the process you want to improve, who is involved, what happens today, and what would count as success. From that, a competent studio can tell you which of the figures above applies, and what would push it up.
We will tell you if your budget and your scope do not match before you spend anything. That conversation costs you nothing and is considerably cheaper than discovering it halfway through a build.
Want a real figure for your project?
Describe the problem in plain language. You will get a written scope and a fixed price before any work begins, and an honest answer if we are not the right team for it.
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