How Much Does Custom Software Cost: Factors that Affect Your Budget

Custom software development is a great way to move your business forward and create a unique identity for your brand. If you’re working on a tight budget, know how to balance the factors.

How much does custom software cost? To give you a quick answer, the final cost can range from $10,000 to a million dollars.

Yes, custom software development can have a high cost due to the many factors that you’ll find below. But if you want to hit a tight budget, we can help you about each cost factor so you can limit the total cost.

Looking for developers to build your dream custom software? We, at Laneways Software & Digital, can help you. Send your name, email and contact us to know more.

How Do You Price A Software Project?

Software Size

The size of custom software usually is defined by two parts: the number of screens or windows and the number of end-users.

Screens, pages, or windows is a parlance term in software development that refers to a unique set of visuals that users interact with. For end-users, they might refer to it as a menu or modules. Usually, small ones range from 10 to 20 screens, and large ones have more than 40 screens.

End-users refer to the number of concurrent unique users. Custom software that has many users, like enterprise software, requires a lot of optimizations, tests, and adjustments that need to be done to ensure stability. And of course, long time duration costs more, especially for developers who charge per hour.

Complexity of the Software

Software complexity refers to what tasks are expected from the custom software. This is mostly affected by the type of software and the number of features it has.

Examples of complex custom software are simulations, database automation, and control systems. These systems have complicated logic that requires heavy analysis and large number crunching.

Software projects that are more complex will result in a larger development cost due to needing a highly skilled software developer and a longer time for the development process.

A highly skilled development team with steep hourly rates paired with a long time duration project will increase the overall software development cost.

Integration of Third-Party Software

Integration of third-party software component refers to installing or incorporating pre-built software into your custom software—some systems integrating components that can be essential to your software development.

Integrations like communication libraries, payment gateways, and protocols are examples of these.

Although much useful, integration with other systems or components can introduce a lot of unknown variables from external software during development.

We build custom software with modern solutions in mind for any business and sizes!

Data Migration

Migration refers to transferring data as desired in an existing system to the new system.

The steps of the process are fairly straight forward because the two systems will store data differently. The migration of existing data is done by running custom scripts that transfer old data and then rearranging them to fit into your new application.

Migration efforts are run through a series of tests to see if the data is translated correctly, and the new software will take data and store it correctly.

In some cases, software developers find migration to be extremely difficult due to the data in an existing system that doesn’t conform to any standard. With this, it will accrue additional software development costs due to figuring out the translation rules, writing the scripts, coding, and testing.

Complexity of Visual Design

Creative design refers to the aesthetic appeal that you want on your custom software applications. Including eye-catching illustrations and animations will add to the custom software development cost and project time as you’ll be hiring design artists to help you per hour.

Development Region

Development region refers to the location of your partner developers which greatly affects the cost of a project. How much does custom software cost per hour? In Asia, a developer has an average range of $35 to $55 per hour; in Europe, from $50 to $100; and in the US, from $100 to $200 per hour.

Custom Software Development on a Budget - A Short Checklist

After talking about factors affecting software development prices, take time answering and pondering the questions below to maximize your budget efficiency.

What is my vision for my developed software?
Who and how many are my end-users?
What does my custom software specifically do?
What key features and design should I put in to gain an edge over competitors?
What are the key integrations should I have?
What are the legal regulations that affect my software?
What core legacy data should I migrate?

After pondering these questions and decisions were carefully made, you can be sure that this will positively affect the project.

But like building a house, development prices can come at high costs too. If carefully planned and executed, it can be done on a budget.