The quote says one number and the work seems invisible. Here is what the money goes on, including the parts clients are surprised to be charged for.
Key Takeaways
- The quote says one number and the work seems invisible.
- Here is what the money goes on, including the parts clients are surprised to be charged for.
Software is priced by time, and the time goes to places that are invisible from outside. Here is the breakdown, including the parts clients most often query.
Understanding the problem
Before anything is built, someone has to learn your process well enough to model it. What the statuses are, which rules are absolute and which are usually, what the exceptions are, and which of those exceptions actually matter.
This is not a formality and it is where the largest savings occur. An hour spent discovering that two of your five requested features are variations of one thing saves considerably more than an hour of coding.
Designing the data
Deciding how information is structured before any screens exist. This is the least visible work in a project and the most expensive to get wrong, because everything built afterwards assumes it.
A data model that anticipates a second user, a second currency, or a history of changes costs a little now. Adding any of those later means changing tables that everything already reads and writes.
Building
The part everyone pictures, and typically less than half the total. Screens, logic, connections to other systems.
Worth knowing: a feature's cost lives in its edge cases rather than its description. "Users can upload a photo" is a sentence. Behind it sits file size limits, formats, orientation, storage, what happens on a failed upload, and whether an image needs resizing. The sentence is a minute. The feature is a day.
Testing
Different work from building, and the first thing removed from a squeezed quote.
It means running the software on real devices, with wrong input, on a slow connection, by someone actively trying to break it. Every bug caught here is one your customer does not find, and finding it later costs more because by then someone has built on top of it.
Deployment and handover
Getting it running on a real server, with a domain, a certificate, backups, and monitoring that tells someone when it stops.
Handover is part of this: the documentation, the account list, and showing your staff how to use the thing. A system nobody was trained on gets used at a fraction of its capability, which is a waste of everything that came before.
What continues afterwards
Hosting and domain renewal. SSL. Backups, and occasionally testing that they restore. Security patches for the libraries underneath, which is the one people forget and the one that matters most, because unpatched dependencies are how sites get compromised.
Maintenance with us starts from NPR 8,000 a month for that. It is not an upsell; it is the cost of software continuing to work, and any vendor who implies otherwise is setting up a conversation you will have later anyway.
Where our numbers start
A brochure website from NPR 25,000, a business website from NPR 40,000, an online store from NPR 60,000, a custom web application from NPR 80,000, and a mobile app from NPR 150,000. Floors for a defined scope rather than an estimate for your project.
If a quote you receive is far below these, the useful question is not why it is cheap. It is which of the stages above it does not include.
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Written by
AntByte Labs
Engineering · AntByte Labs
AntByte Labs is a Engineering at AntByte Labs, sharing expert insights on technology, software development, and digital innovation to help businesses grow.