Why we’re showing you this

The single biggest fear a client has when hiring a software team is not that the work will be bad. It’s that the number will move. That the quote was a hook, and the real cost arrives later, in pieces, once you’re too committed to walk away.

The only honest answer to that fear is to show you how the number is built. So here is a genuine estimate: the phases, the hours, the team, and — importantly — the assumptions it depends on. If those assumptions break, the number moves, and we tell you before it does.

The estimate

A web platform with user accounts, real-time state and third-party integrations

Client and product anonymised. Everything else is unchanged.

Notice the shape of it. Backend is 57% of the effort. Design and wireframes together are 12%. That ratio is normal and it is worth understanding: the expensive part of software is almost never the part you can see. Anyone quoting you mostly for screens is quoting you for the easy half.

Who does the work

No account managers. No “engagement leads”. The people on your project are the people building it.

The assumptions — the part nobody shows you

An estimate is only true if its assumptions hold. These are the ones that were attached to the number above. Every quote has assumptions like these. Most agencies just don’t tell you what they are — which is precisely how a fixed price quietly stops being fixed.

• Logo and email addresses are supplied by the client; we integrate them.
• The client purchases any third-party extensions and provides access.
• Email content for automated messages is supplied by the client.
• Hosting is the client’s choice; we default to a standard provider if unspecified.
• Questions from the team get an answer within two working days — silence stalls the build.
• If the agreed scope changes, the price changes — and we tell you the cost before we do the work, not after.

That last one is the whole contract in a sentence. It is the difference between a fixed price and a hostage situation.

What’s different now

That estimate is from our pre-AI era, and we’re showing it because the structure of honest scoping hasn’t changed. What has changed is the hours.

AI agents now do a large share of the scaffolding, the test writing and the documentation — the repetitive volume that used to consume a great deal of that 350-hour backend figure. Our engineers still design the system, review every line and own the result. The judgment is unchanged. The typing is not.

That’s the entire reason our prices look the way they do. Not a discount, not a loss-leader — a genuinely lower cost of production, passed on rather than pocketed. See our published pricing →