What custom software actually costs in India, and what moves the number

The first question anyone asks about custom software is what it costs, and the first answer they usually get is “it depends”. That is true and useless. Here is the more helpful version: what the number starts at, and the five things that move it.

Every figure below is where our own quotes begin. Someone else will price differently. The point is not the number — it is knowing which of your requirements is the expensive one, before you ask anybody for a quotation.

Where the numbers start

• A business website — from about ₹25,000. Several pages, your services, an enquiry form that actually reaches you, and the setup that lets Google find it.
• A custom system or an app — from about ₹1,50,000. A working first version that your staff can use on real work, not a demo.
• A developer by the month — from about ₹60,000. For work that keeps coming and keeps changing.
• Keeping it running afterwards — from about ₹5,000 a month. Hosting, backups, security updates, small changes.

All exclusive of GST. If you are being quoted far below the first two, ask what happens after launch, and ask who owns the code.

The five things that move the number

1. How many kinds of people use it

A system one person uses is a list. A system an owner, a manager, three salespeople and six technicians use is five different screens, five sets of permissions, and a rule about who is allowed to see what. This is the single biggest multiplier, and it is the one people forget to mention in the first conversation.

“Just a simple CRM” and “a simple CRM where the technician only sees today’s jobs and cannot see prices” are not the same project.

2. Whether it has to talk to something else

Every integration is a small project of its own. Pulling leads from IndiaMART, sending on WhatsApp, pushing invoices into Tally, taking money through a payment gateway — each one has its own approval process, its own quirks, and its own way of breaking at 11pm.

Two integrations are normal. Six is a different quotation.

3. Whether you need an app, or a website that works on a phone

This is worth thinking about carefully, because the honest answer is often the cheaper one. If your team needs to open the system on a phone, a well-built web app does that. You need a real app in the stores when you need the things only an app can do: working with no signal, camera and GPS capture as part of the job, push notifications people will act on.

If none of those three apply, an app is a want, not a requirement, and it adds store accounts, review cycles and two platforms to maintain.

4. What has to come across from the old system

Data migration is the classic surprise. Three thousand customers in a spreadsheet where the phone number column sometimes has two numbers in it, sometimes has a name, and sometimes is blank — that is a day of work before anyone writes a line of the new system. Nobody enjoys quoting it, and it is the item most often left out and argued about later.

5. How much of it is reporting

Entering data is cheap. Getting it back out in the shape the owner thinks about the business is not. “Show me this month by salesperson, by source, compared with last month, and send it to me on WhatsApp every morning” is a feature, and it should be priced like one.

What costs less than people expect

Two things, usually. Design, if you are happy with clean and conventional rather than distinctive — most business software should be boring to look at and obvious to use. And hosting: a system for a business with twenty staff runs comfortably on a server that costs less per month than one mobile recharge plan.

The thing that actually blows up budgets

Not any of the above. It is scope agreed in conversation rather than in writing.

You describe what you need over a call. The developer hears eighty per cent of it. Six weeks later you see something that is not what you pictured, and now there is a disagreement about whether the missing part was always included. Both of you are being honest. Neither of you can prove anything.

The fix costs nothing: a written scope before any money moves. Every screen, every rule, in plain language, with a price at the bottom. If a developer will not produce one, that is information.

What to do before you ask for a quote

Write down, on one page:

• The five screens you imagine your staff using most days.
• Who is allowed to see what.
• What it must connect to.
• What you have today that would need to come across.
• The one report you would look at every morning.

That page will get you a quotation that means something, from anyone you send it to — us included. It is also the cheapest hour you will spend on the whole project.