Pricing · United Kingdom
What custom software actually costs to build in the UK
Send the same brief to five UK studios and you will get five numbers, often an order of magnitude apart. That is not because four of them are dishonest. It is because “build me an app” describes almost nothing, and each studio fills the gap with its own assumptions. This piece is about what genuinely drives a bespoke software quote, what should not, and how to tell a serious estimate from a hopeful one.
Why the same brief gets wildly different quotes
A quote is not a price for software. It is a price for a specific set of assumptions about scope, and the assumptions are usually unstated. One studio hears “a customer portal” and prices a login and a table. Another hears the same words and prices role-based permissions, an audit trail, a payment reconciliation process and a data migration from three spreadsheets. Both quotes are honest. They are answering different questions.
The practical consequence: comparing quotes without comparing scope is meaningless. The cheapest number is frequently the one that has quietly excluded the most work.
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 have to be designed, tested and enforced on the server, not merely hidden in the interface. If an administrator, a manager, a field engineer and a customer all see different things, that is real work, and it is the work most often underestimated at quoting stage.
How many outside systems you must talk to
Each integration is its own small project with its own failure modes. A well-documented payment provider is a few days. A legacy line-of-business system with no API, or one that only exports spreadsheets overnight, can take longer than the application around it. In the UK this usually means Stripe or GoCardless for money in, and Xero, Sage or QuickBooks for the finance side. It also means whatever the business already runs, and those are the integrations that decide your timeline.
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 on projects that involve it, it is routinely 20 to 30 percent of the effort.
How much reporting is expected
A dashboard showing counts is quick. Reports that reconcile against money, or that finance will use to file, need their 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, and it is not a coding problem at all.
Compliance, because it is a UK build
If you handle personal data, UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 apply to what you build, not only to what you buy. That shapes real decisions: what gets logged, how long it is kept, whether analytics can be cookieless, what happens when someone asks to be erased. If your users include the public, accessibility under the Equality Act 2010 is a legal obligation, and the working standard is WCAG 2.2. Retrofitting either of these later costs considerably more than designing for them from the start.
Whether it must work on a poor connection
Less of a concern for a London office, very much one for field teams, warehouses, rural sites and anywhere with patchy mobile coverage. If a submission can fail halfway, the application has to handle a failed save, a refresh mid-checkout and a duplicate payment attempt without corrupting the record. That is an architectural difference, not a polish item.
What should not move the number much
- The framework. React or otherwise is the studio’s 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, compliance and data.
Typical UK quotes, and ours
Published UK agency guides put bespoke work roughly in these bands. They are wide because scope varies enormously, but the order of magnitude is consistent across them.
| What you are buying | Typical UK range | Our starting figure |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing site or landing page | £3,000 – £15,000 | $400 |
| Custom web application | £15,000 – £60,000 | $1,300 |
| Mobile app, iOS and Android | £25,000 – £100,000 | $2,700 |
| SaaS product | £50,000 – £250,000 | $5,300 |
We are a studio based in Nigeria and we invoice in USD, which is where that gap comes from. It is worth being blunt about what a gap that size does and does not mean. It does not mean the work is worse by definition, and it does not mean it is the same. It means the cost base is different: senior engineering salaries in Lagos are a fraction of London salaries, and we are not paying Mayfair rent.
The offshore question, answered honestly
If you have read this far, the real question is probably whether hiring a studio you have never met, in a country you have never visited, is a sensible risk to take for a project this size. It is a fair question, and the answer depends almost entirely on process rather than price.
The specific things worth checking before you commit to any studio abroad, including us:
- Real overlap with your working day. We work West Africa Time, UTC+1, which gives roughly 7 to 8 hours of overlap with the UK and Central Europe. Effectively a full working day together, with no early starts for either side.
- A written scope and a fixed price before work starts. Not an hourly rate and not a range. If the scope is not defined enough to fix a price, it is not defined enough to start.
- Who owns the code, stated plainly. You should own it from day one, in your own repository, with no withholding if the relationship ends.
- Working software on a schedule, not a single reveal. Every week or two you should be able to click through something real.
- How your data is handled. If you handle personal data, you need a written agreement covering it. Our own notice explains what we collect and why.
We set out all of this in more detail on our working with international clients page, including the payment methods we accept, how access to your systems is scoped and revoked, and the fact that we sign an NDA as standard before a scoping call rather than waiting to be asked.
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, payment processing, app store charges and ongoing support 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. This applies to our figures as much as anyone’s, which is exactly why we publish them and explain where the difference comes from.
The costs that continue after launch
Build cost is the beginning, not the total. Budget separately for hosting, payment processing fees from Stripe or GoCardless, email and SMS, domain and certificates, and some level of ongoing maintenance. A system nobody maintains degrades quickly, and the eventual fixes cost more than the maintenance would have.
We would rather you plan for this openly. A project maintained at a modest monthly cost is a better outcome than one 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.
Book a free scoping call How we work with international clients