How much does custom software cost?
Internal tools that once ran to agency six figures now commonly land in the four-to-five-figure range from one senior person with AI leverage; the drivers are integrations, users and exceptions, not screens. The real question is cost against the licence fees and hours the tool retires.
The longer answer
In practice.
What moves the number
How many systems it must talk to, how many kinds of user it serves, how
exception-riddled the process is, and how bulletproof it must be. A tool three
people use with grace costs a fraction of one that must survive the public.
The comparison that matters
Not "custom versus free" but custom versus the SaaS subscriptions, licence
seats and staff hours it replaces over three years. Custom loses that math
often, and I will say so; when it wins, it wins permanently, because you own
it.
Proof over promises
Before believing any of this, compile my public reference build, per
custom software: a working platform with
52 checks you can run. Then we talk about yours, and the quote is fixed and
written.
Same rabbit hole