What custom software costs for a mid-market company.

Why nobody can give you a number on the first call

Ask five suppliers what a custom system costs and you get five ranges that do not overlap. That is not evasion. A quote for software is a quote for a scope, and on the first call the scope is a sentence: "we need to replace the spreadsheets", "we want a portal for our clients", "the app has to talk to the ERP". Every one of those hides a decision that moves the number by a factor of three.

What a serious supplier can tell you on the first call is what the price depends on, and what it would take to close it. That is what this page does.

The five things that move the price

How much of the scope is still unknown. A system that replaces one process you can describe in an afternoon is a different job from one that replaces how a department works. The unknown is the single biggest driver, and it is why a fixed price without paid discovery is either padded or a trap.

Integrations with systems you do not control. Talking to your own database is cheap. Talking to an ERP, a PMS, a booking engine, a payment gateway or an ageing internal API is not, because you are buying somebody else's constraints: their rate limits, their downtime, their data model, their release calendar. Two integrations can cost more than the rest of the system.

Migrating what already exists. Nobody starts empty. There are years of rows in spreadsheets, photos in WhatsApp, PDFs in a shared drive and a couple of Access databases nobody admits to. Getting that in, cleaned, with identifiers preserved so history still matches, is a lot of work, and it is the line most often left out of a cheap quote.

Users, roles and permissions. One role for everybody is a weekend. Five roles, each seeing a different slice, with an audit trail of who changed what, is a system. Permissions are not a feature you add later: they shape the data model.

What happens when it breaks. A tool three people use internally can be fixed on Monday. A system your operation runs on at three in the morning needs monitoring, backups you have actually restored from, and somebody whose job it is to answer. That is a cost, and it is the one that keeps running after the invoice is paid.

The three shapes a budget takes

A tool that replaces a spreadsheet. One process, one team, a handful of screens, no external integration. The value is that the sheet stops being the system of record. This is the smallest piece of custom software worth building, and it is often the right first phase of something larger.

A platform that replaces a process. Several departments, roles that see different things, incidents with photos from a phone, checklists, a goods receipt, an audit trail. This is where a company stops coordinating in email and starts coordinating in one place. It usually needs at least one integration and a data migration.

A system of record. The thing the business runs on. Uptime matters, data loss is not survivable, an auditor may ask questions and the answer has to be in the system. Here the software is the smaller half of the cost: the rest is architecture, testing, monitoring and the discipline to change it safely.

Most companies think they are buying the third and should start with the first.

Why a fixed price needs paid discovery first

There are only three ways to price software. By the hour, which puts every risk on you. A fixed price on a vague brief, which puts every risk on the supplier and is therefore padded, or is a trap that pays for itself in change requests. Or a small paid piece of work that closes the scope, and a fixed price on top of that.

Polargate does the third. A Discovery Sprint is two weeks of paid senior work that ends in a decision pack: the scope of phase one and its exclusions, the architecture and the data model, a named risk list, a fixed price and a plan. The sprint has its own fixed price, agreed before it starts. If you do not, the pack is yours and you can take it to anybody.

The recommendation is sometimes "do not build this yet". A supplier who has never said that to a client is telling you something.

How we work with you

We do not publish a price list, because a list price for software is either padded for the worst case or wrong for yours. What we publish is how we work: every engagement has a fixed price, and you get it in writing before you commit.

• AI Visibility Audit. What ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can read on your current site.
• Discovery Sprint. Two weeks to a closed scope, a closed architecture and a closed price.
• AI-first website. Every route as static HTML, in two or three languages.
• App to production. From prototype to the App Store and Google Play, release pipeline included.
• Custom operating system. The internal portal or web app that finally replaces the spreadsheets, in a first phase of eight to twelve modules.
• Care. Maintenance and steady evolution, with two monthly pools of hours you can see.

A short call gives you a first read of scope and price, and the Discovery Sprint turns it into your number.

The cost that starts on launch day

You buy software once and keep it running for years. Dependencies get security patches, Apple and Google change their rules twice a year, the browser your finance team uses gets an update, and the integration you built against changes its API. A system nobody maintains does not stay still: it decays, and one day the decay is an outage.

Budget for it from the start, as a line and not as a surprise. Ours is a monthly retainer with two pools of hours, one for maintenance and one for urgent work, both visible in your portal. Whoever you buy from, ask what the equivalent costs and what it covers in writing.

What you actually own

This is the question that separates a supplier from a landlord. Ask who owns the repository, the cloud account, the domain and the database, and ask it before you sign. The answer should be you, in writing, with the accounts in your name and the supplier holding access rather than the keys.

At Polargate the backend runs on your own Supabase project, the code is in your repository, and the hosting account is yours. We do it on purpose: a supplier who holds your infrastructure is a supplier you cannot leave.

Eight questions to ask before you sign

1. What exactly is in phase one, and what is explicitly out? 2. Which integrations are in the price, and what happens if that API changes? 3. Who migrates the existing data, and how is it verified? 4. Who owns the repository, the cloud account and the domain? 5. What does maintenance cost, and what does it include in writing? 6. Who is writing the code, and can I speak to them? 7. What is the total for the first twelve months, not the first invoice? 8. What would make you tell me not to build this?

A supplier who answers all eight without flinching is worth more than one who is ten percent cheaper.