Project Cost Estimator
Indicative cost and timeline for a software build.
What are you building?
What does it need to do?
How much design?
$25,000 – $85,000
- Effort
- 84–167 days
- Elapsed time
- 1–5 months
- Day rate assumed
- $320–$480
An indicative range, not a quote. Real scope moves these numbers, usually once we understand the parts you have not described yet.
Where the effort goes
- Build61–122 d
- Discovery & scoping7–15 d
- QA & testing9–18 d
- Project management6–12 d
Get a real number
Send this over and we'll come back with a scoped estimate — including the questions that would change it. Two business days, no sales script.
Estimating a particular kind of project?
Each of these starts the calculator from a sensible position for that project type, and covers what drives cost there specifically.
Choose what you are building, what it needs to do and how much design it deserves, and get an indicative cost range, effort estimate and realistic timeline. It is a starting point for a conversation, not a quote — but it is a far better starting point than a blank page.
Why a range instead of a price?
Because a single number at this stage would be wrong. Software cost is driven by details nobody has established yet — how messy the data is, how many edge cases the business has, how quickly decisions get made. A range is what is honestly knowable before discovery; anyone quoting you an exact figure from a form is guessing with more confidence than the situation allows.
What is not included?
Ongoing hosting and third-party licences, content and data migration beyond the straightforward, and support after launch. Those are real costs and worth budgeting separately — they are excluded here because they vary far too much to estimate from a handful of checkboxes.
Why is discovery a line item?
Because skipping it is the most expensive thing you can do. A couple of weeks spent establishing what actually needs building routinely saves months of building the wrong thing. It is listed separately so you can see what it costs rather than finding it buried in a day rate.
How is the timeline calculated?
Effort divided across a small team working in parallel, not one person working sequentially. Adding people does not shorten a project proportionally — coordination costs grow — so the range assumes a sensible team size rather than an arbitrarily large one.
Can I use this to brief another agency?
Yes, and we would rather you arrived at any agency with a clear idea of scope than not. Our project brief builder turns the same thinking into a document you can send to several firms for comparable quotes.
We build the kind of software this tool is a small piece of — web platforms, mobile apps and design systems, end to end.