"How much will it cost?" is the first question every client asks, and the honest answer is always the same: it depends on what you are building. This guide explains exactly what it depends on, so you can read any quote — ours or a competitor's — and understand where the number comes from.
What actually drives the cost
Two projects that sound identical in one sentence can differ several times over in effort. The levers that matter most:
- Scope — the number of screens, user roles and workflows. An app with a customer side, a vendor side and an admin panel is three products, not one.
- Integrations — payment gateways, SMS/WhatsApp, accounting tools, shipping APIs. Each integration is real work, and legacy systems cost more to connect than modern ones.
- Design depth — a clean template-based UI is far cheaper than a fully custom, animated brand experience. Both are valid; they are different budgets.
- Platforms — web only, or web plus iOS plus Android? Cross-platform frameworks like Flutter and React Native narrow the gap but do not remove it.
- Timeline — compressing a schedule means more engineers in parallel, which raises coordination cost.
Typical ranges by project type
We deliberately quote in bands rather than fixed figures before discovery, because a number given without understanding your scope is a guess. The bands we work in — the same ones you will find in our contact form — run from under ₹1 lakh for a focused business website, through ₹1–10 lakh for most business web applications, portals and standard mobile apps, to ₹10–25 lakh and above for multi-platform products, marketplaces and SaaS builds. For international clients the equivalent engagements typically start around USD 5k and scale with the same levers.
Where your project lands inside a band is decided in a discovery conversation: we map the workflows, agree what version one must do, and only then commit to a number.
Fixed price vs dedicated team vs hourly
The engagement model changes how the same work is priced. A fixed-price project suits a well-defined scope: you know the total before we start. A dedicated team suits an evolving product: you pay a predictable monthly rate for named engineers and steer the roadmap sprint by sprint. Hourly support suits maintenance and small improvements. Many clients start fixed-price for version one, then move to a dedicated arrangement once the product is live.
Hidden costs to budget for
The build is not the whole bill. Plan for hosting and domains, third-party licences and API usage, app store developer accounts, SSL and email services, and ongoing maintenance — security updates, OS releases and small fixes. A realistic rule of thumb across the industry is to reserve a meaningful annual amount for keeping software healthy after launch; we spell this out line by line in every proposal so nothing surprises you later.
How to get an accurate quote
Write down the three or four workflows your software must handle, who uses each one, and any systems it must talk to. That one page is enough for us to give you a genuine estimate instead of a guess. Share your requirement and our team will come back with a scoped proposal — the consultation is free.