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The honest answer is “it depends,” anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 or more. That’s not a satisfying answer on its own, but it’s a lot like asking how much it costs to build a building. A shed and a stadium are both buildings. Once you know what the software actually needs to do, a real estimate becomes possible.
The more complex the software, the longer it takes to design, build, test, and document. Complexity is hard to measure precisely, but the number of screens involved (anything the user views, edits, or interacts with) is one of the clearest signals. Small applications typically run 10 to 25 screens, medium applications 25 to 40, and large applications are anything beyond that.
Roughly speaking: small projects run $25,000 to $75,000, medium projects $75,000 to $200,000, and large systems can run $250,000 or more. There are exceptions depending on the specifics. This is about interactive custom software, not a simple website that mostly displays information or takes basic form input.
Complex logic, heavy analysis, or many variations in how the software needs to behave all add time, and therefore cost. So does visual design: custom colors, fonts, imagery, video, or animation can add real time to a project, often another $5,000 to $20,000 or more depending on how much custom work is involved.
Integrating with other systems adds cost too, and how much depends heavily on what you’re connecting to. Older or more specialized systems are usually harder to work with than modern ones. Migrating data from an existing system is its own project in miniature: even with a standard database underneath, you still need to understand what the data means before you can move it somewhere new and have it make sense.
Custom software can be designed to fit your budget. If a feature costs more than it’s currently worth to you, it can wait for a later release rather than delaying everything else. That decision needs to be made before construction starts, since cost is tied directly to the time it takes to build something.
Even if some features are getting delayed, it’s worth telling us about them upfront. A good design accounts for where the software is headed, not just where it starts, so those pieces are easier to add later. Leave them out of the conversation, and adding them afterward usually costs more, because the original design wasn’t built to expect them.
Deciding to add a swimming pool between the fifth and sixth floor after a thirty-storey building is already finished is a lot more disruptive than planning for it from the start. You’d need to lift the other twenty-five floors just to fit it in, then deal with the extra structural load all that water puts on every floor below it, plus the plumbing and moisture management that should have been designed in from day one.
These are general industry figures, useful for getting a rough sense of scale. Where we tend to differ is timeline. HEA (Happily Ever After), our own relationship-matching platform, has 59 database tables, nearly all of them with a full set of screens for entering, viewing, and managing that data, plus a dashboard on top. That puts it solidly in the “large” category by screen count. It was built in 73 days, including the time spent working through problems that had never come up before. We won’t promise every project moves that fast, every project is different, but it’s a real example of what our actual output looks like, not just a claim.
Tell us about it. We’ll tell you honestly whether it’s a fit.
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