How much does a bespoke app cost?
Richard Hardy · CTO
How much does bespoke app or software development cost?
Bespoke app and systems development in the UK realistically starts at around £10,000 for a focused internal tool or first version, with most business platforms landing in the £25,000–£50,000+ range once integrations, user roles and real-world workflows are involved. The main cost drivers are the number of user types, the systems the app must integrate with, and how much of the workflow is genuinely custom. A fixed price after proper scoping should be the norm, not the exception.
Software pricing has an honesty problem: the same brief can attract quotes from £5,000 to £500,000. Having built business systems at RJDM since 2015 — inside a studio running since 2001 — here is how to think about what a bespoke app genuinely costs, and why the cheap quote is usually the expensive one.
Where the money goes
A bespoke app is not mostly screens. Screens are the visible 20%. The other 80% is the model of your business underneath: who can see what, what happens when two people edit the same record, what the system does when an integration is down, how data gets in from the tools you already use and out to the people who need it. That underlying model — not the visual design — is what you are actually paying senior engineers to get right.
Realistic UK price bands
At RJDM, apps and systems work starts from £10,000. That buys a focused first piece: one core workflow, a small set of users, done properly. Between £10,000 and £25,000 you get a small platform — a client portal, a booking or quoting system, an internal tool that replaces the spreadsheet everyone fears. From £25,000 to £50,000 and beyond you are into proper builds: multi-role platforms, systems integration and APIs, workflow automation, AI-enabled tooling that changes how a team works day to day.
The three questions that set the price
First: how many kinds of user are there? Every distinct role — admin, staff, client, guest — multiplies the permission logic and the screens. Second: what must it integrate with? Each external system (accounts package, CRM, legacy database) adds real engineering, because their failure modes become your failure modes. Third: how custom is the workflow? If an off-the-shelf tool does 90% of the job, buy it — a good consultancy will tell you that in the scoping call, not after the invoice.
Why fixed price matters more in software
Software is where open-ended day-rate engagements quietly double. The discipline that protects you is scoping: a written definition of the first version, a fixed price against it, and changes priced before they are built — never discovered on the bill. At RJDM we scope within 48 hours and fix the price after scoping. It forces us to think before we build, which is exactly what you want from your supplier.
Budget for version two on day one
The most successful systems we have built for clients across healthcare, manufacturing, automotive and finance share one trait: version one was deliberately small. Ship the core workflow, put it in real hands, and let actual usage — not a stakeholder workshop — decide what version two is. Plan roughly a third of the initial budget for the improvements you cannot predict yet. That is not a failure of planning; it is how good software is made.
