Ask three firms to quote the same product and you can get $40k, $150k and $400k. That spread isn't fraud — it reflects genuinely different teams, scopes and risk. The global software outsourcing market is worth roughly $613 billion in 2025 precisely because companies are constantly making this build-cost calculation. Here's how to read a quote.
What you're actually paying for
A software price is mostly senior time × risk × scope. Three projects with the same feature list can cost wildly different amounts because:
- Seniority differs. Hiring a single bad developer can cost 30% of their first-year salary just to replace — and far more in shipped bugs and lost time. Cheaper teams often mean more, less-experienced hands.
- Scope is fuzzy. "A marketplace app" can mean two screens or two hundred. Vague scope is the number-one driver of the 27% average budget overrun.
- Quality bar differs. Tests, accessibility, security review and documentation cost real time — and save far more later.
Rough 2026 ranges
- MVP / proof-of-concept: $40k–$90k — one focused product, a small senior team, 2–3 months.
- Production product: $90k–$300k — real users, integrations, security, scale.
- Enterprise platform: $300k+ — multi-team, compliance, legacy integration, SLAs.
These are starting points, not promises — the only honest number comes after a short discovery.
How to compare quotes fairly
- 1.Normalise the scope. Write one spec and have everyone quote that. Otherwise you're comparing different projects.
- 2.Ask what's excluded. QA, deployment, project management and post-launch support are where "cheap" quotes hide their real cost.
- 3.Price the maintenance tail. Software costs money every year it lives. A quote that ignores maintenance is incomplete — we covered why that tail matters.
- 4.Weigh the risk discount. A team that has shipped at your scale before carries less delivery risk — that's worth paying for.
The expensive quote is sometimes the cheap one. Re-building a failed project means paying twice.
Want a real number for your project? Send us the scope and we'll come back with a transparent, itemised estimate in 48 hours.
Sources
Written by ivector
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