Pricing
What bespoke software costs in the UK, and what we charge.
Most pages on this subject give you a range of £10,000 to £500,000 and a list of factors. That is not a price, it is a hedge. Here are our actual numbers.
Day rates
Three tiers, and what each one buys.
For context, the median UK software developer contract rate was £505 a day in the six months to July 2026. A contractor rate covers one person's time. A studio rate covers the architecture decisions, the review, the infrastructure, and the fact that the thing gets deployed and stays up.
£400
per dayEnablement
Workshops, technical review, and helping your team do the work rather than doing it for them.
£600
per dayStandard senior engineering
The rate most projects run at. Architecture, build, review and deployment.
£700 to £750
per daySpecialist
Intelligence platforms, entity resolution, applied AI engineering, and anything carrying a regulated audit trail.
Fixed prices
By project size, including the small end nobody publishes.
Every incumbent on this search starts at £10,000 minimum, which leaves a buyer with a small fixed scope thinking they cannot afford anything at all.
£960 to £1,500
A small business website
Custom built, not a template. Plus £50 a month for the care plan covering hosting, security, updates and professional email.
From our work: A marine and industrial disposal firm, live with a serverless contact pipeline and WCAG AA contrast.
£1,750 to £1,800
A small fixed scope
One clearly defined problem with a clearly defined finish line.
From our work: A B2B engineering firm: website rebuild plus a rebuilt ad account with conversion tracking, £1,750 fixed.
£9,000 to £22,500
A mid-sized platform
Multi-tenant, integrated, with real users and real data.
From our work: An ISO 27001 programme at £9,000. An AI production engine at £14,000 to £19,000. A coaching platform at £22,500.
£52,000 to £76,000
A large platform
Built to hold up under audit. Chain of custody, calibrated confidence, tamper-evident logging.
From our work: An intelligence platform: £52,000 standard delivery, £65,000 accelerated, £76,000 with the crypto-risk module.
How the money works
The mechanics, which is where most quotes go quiet.
Every phase is separately commissionable
Scope, build, ship, run. Each is a fixed fee and you commission the next one only after you have seen the last delivered. You are never signing for £60,000 on day one.
Discovery is credited in full against the build
Commission the build and the discovery fee comes off the price. Do not, and you keep every document it produced and owe nothing further. Discovery is the cheapest way to find out a project should not go ahead.
10% off if you pay a phase upfront
A real discount for real cashflow, not a closing tactic.
Third-party running costs are quoted separately and billed at cost
For most platforms that is £40 to £80 a month of AWS. We do not mark it up and we do not bury it in the build price. You own the accounts.
Pausing beyond two weeks carries a re-onboarding fee
Picking a codebase back up costs real time. Pretending otherwise means pricing it into everybody else's quote.
Ownership transfers to you on payment, in writing
The repository, the infrastructure accounts, the domain. Nothing is locked to us and there is no exit fee.
The 10x question
Why quotes for the same brief differ by ten times.
Scope
A SaaS MVP can mean one screen and a Stripe key, or multi-tenancy, roles, billing, an admin console and an audit log. Those are not the same product and should not be the same price.
Speed, which matters less than people assume
We took one platform from brief to live in under sixteen hours for a House of Lords event. That was possible because the scope was decided before we started, not because anything was cut.
What is actually included
Some quotes are development only, with design, testing, deployment and handover charged after you have signed. Ask what happens on the day it goes live, and who owns the repository afterwards.
Due diligence
What to ask any studio, including us.
If these answers are vague at the quote stage, they will be vague at the invoice stage.
What is your day rate, and what does a day include?
What does the fixed price exclude?
Is discovery credited against the build?
Who owns the code and the cloud accounts at the end?
What do the third-party services cost per month?
What happens if we pause for a month?
Getting a number for your project
Tell us what the software has to do and who has to use it. If the scope is clear we will quote a fixed price. If it is not, we will quote a scoping phase, and that fee comes off the build.
Start a projectOr see what we have built.