What bespoke software actually costs (and when it doesn't make sense)

"Bespoke software" has a pricing problem, and it's mostly self-inflicted. For years the industry quoted like a mystery: no prices on websites, "it depends" as an opening position, six-figure numbers revealed in the fourth meeting. So people assume it's expensive, because nobody ever showed them the sum.

We publish ours. The price is your current SaaS bill, held flat for 24 months, then nothing. This post is about what sits behind that number, and, more usefully, the times when you shouldn't take it.

What the price actually covers

For a typical mid-market rebuild, everything is included: discovery, design, the build itself, migration of your data, testing, hosting setup, and a warranty period where fixes are on us. There's no separate licence, no per-seat fee, no premium tier holding back the features you'll obviously want.

Take a business paying £2,500 a month for a 25-seat subscription. The Deedware price is £60,000 over 24 months. If that sounds like a lot, hold it against the alternative: five years of the subscription at typical annual rises costs about £190,000, and you still own nothing at the end. We covered that sum in the previous post.

After month 24 the licence is £0. If you want us to keep maintaining it, that's an optional retainer, and you'll know its price before you commit to anything. If you'd rather take the code in-house or hand it to your own developer, it's yours. The contract is one page of plain English and you can read it before you pay anything.

Why agency quotes look so different

Agencies aren't wrong, they're just selling something else. A bespoke build quoted the traditional way carries their sales pipeline, account management layers, a scoping engagement, and a rate card built for clients who want to be sold to. By the time it reaches you, the same 25-seat rebuild arrives at £150,000 to £250,000 with a support contract attached, because that's what the structure costs to run.

We strip the structure down: no account managers, no scoping engagement you pay for separately, no retainer you can't leave. The scoping audit is a fixed, low-cost exercise and it comes off the project price if you go ahead. The result is a number you can actually compare to a subscription bill.

The three times you should keep renting

This is the part a bespoke software company isn't supposed to say. There are businesses where renting is the right answer, and if you're in one of them, a rebuild is a waste of your money:

• Your bill is small. Under about £500 a month total, the maths doesn't work. A custom build has a floor price no honest supplier can go below, and if your subscription costs less than that, stay put. If we spot this in your scoping audit, we'll say so and give you the audit report to keep.
• The product is genuinely alive. Some SaaS is a real product with rapid, meaningful improvements you benefit from every quarter, priced sensibly. If your vendor earns their subscription, pay it.
• You need their network. Marketplaces, integrations that only exist because thousands of other customers demanded them, industry-wide data. You can't rebuild a network effect with code.

What's left, and where it tends to make sense, is the middle of the market: bills from roughly £500 a month up, teams using a corner of an oversized product, workflows held together with spreadsheets and exports, and a price rise in the last twelve months that made someone senior ask a question nobody could answer.

What it involves, honestly

A rebuild takes months, not weeks. It starts with the scoping audit, which maps what your team actually uses, because most businesses use far less of their SaaS than they think. Then design and build in stages, so you see working software early rather than a big reveal at the end. Then migration, testing with your actual people, and a cutover planned around your quietest week, not our delivery schedule.

You'll spend real time on this. If nobody in your business can spare a few hours a week during discovery and testing, that's a genuine reason to wait, and better to know it now.

Find out which side you're on

The calculator on our site gives you the full five-year comparison in about thirty seconds, from your own numbers. If it says renting, keep renting. If it says owning, the scoping audit will confirm it before you commit to anything.