How much does a custom business application cost?

A custom business application has no list price: its cost depends on the business rules, the integrations with your existing tools, the data to migrate, the users and their permissions, and the cost of running it, far more than on the number of screens. A firm figure is only possible once the scope is visible, ideally on a prototype.

That answer is true but not very useful on its own. So here is a sourced market benchmark, the five factors that move the price, the cost most budgets forget, and a method to get a figure you can rely on.

A market benchmark, and how to read it

Few independent sources publish project prices. One of them is Clutch, the B2B review platform, which compiles the budgets reported in verified client reviews. Its software development pricing page, updated in September 2026, reports:

Three cautions before using these numbers:

• They are worldwide. The hourly band reflects a large share of providers in lower-cost regions; Clutch itself notes that rates in the United States and Western Europe are significantly higher than in Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia.
• An average is pulled up by large projects. The typical band and the average describe very different projects.
• They describe development only. Running costs after launch are not part of these figures.

Treat this as an order of magnitude, not as a quote. What matters is understanding why your project will sit low or high in that range.

The price is not in the number of screens

This is the most common estimating mistake, even among experienced buyers: counting screens. Twelve screens look twice as expensive as six.

In practice, a screen is only the visible part. A plain entry form is quick to build. The same form that checks stock availability, applies a different price list per customer, rejects late entries and posts an accounting entry is a different order of work. On a mock-up, the two screens look identical.

What costs money is the rules: the conditions, exceptions and validations your company has accumulated over the years and that nobody ever wrote down. Much of a custom project consists of making them explicit.

The five factors that really move the price

Integrations deserve a special mention: each connection means understanding a format, handling errors and duplicates, and deciding what happens when the other system is down. It is often the most underestimated line of a quote.

The cost that budgets forget: running the application

Many budgets stop at go-live. That is the main source of unpleasant surprises, well ahead of development overruns.

A business application used every day must be hosted, backed up and monitored. Its technical dependencies receive security patches that must be applied. Rules change, sometimes for regulatory reasons. Users ask for adjustments, some of which save a lot of time for very little effort.

An application that is not maintained does not stay stable: it degrades. The question is not whether to budget for it, but in which line it appears.

Three ways to pay, three ways to share the risk

The choice is not only about cash flow. It is also about what you want to control: with a fixed price, you buy a product and the rights transferred to you are discussed when the price is set; with a subscription, LPR Studio remains the publisher and operator, which is what removes the upfront investment. In every case, the rights are defined case by case in the contract. The details of the three models are on our offers page, and the comparison between a fixed price and billing by the hour is in this article.

How to get a figure you can rely on

A quote only becomes firm when the scope is closed. Three conditions, in this order.

1. Describe the problem, not the solution. "We lose two hours a day re-typing orders" can be priced; "we need an order module" cannot.
2. Make the scope visible. A prototype shows the screens, the user journeys and the rules that were kept. What is on screen is in the price; anything else is an explicit decision.
3. Put running costs in the quote. Hosting, backups, monitoring and changes must appear, either included or priced separately. A quote that is silent on this point is incomplete.

A checklist to compare two quotes

• Does each quote describe the same scope, screen by screen and rule by rule?
• Are integrations named, with the way errors and outages are handled?
• Is data migration priced, or assumed to be your job?
• Is the price fixed, or an estimate billed on time spent?
• What happens, and at what cost, when you ask for a change?
• Are hosting, backups, monitoring and security updates included?
• Who owns what at the end, and can another team take the code over?

Two quotes that answer these questions differently are not two prices for the same thing: they are two different projects.

An example: a spreadsheet that became an application

A frequent starting point is a spreadsheet that runs a whole process, with a few people editing it and someone re-typing its content into the accounting or ERP system. Here the cost is driven less by screens than by the rules hidden in the formulas and by the data to clean up. We cover that case in our article on replacing Excel with a custom application.

Where we start

At LPR Studio, the visual prototype is free and presented in a video call within 5 working days, wherever you are. It is what makes a firm price possible, and it is the only moment in a project when you can stop everything at no cost. We also run our own software in production, the Izi-Devis quoting and invoicing app for building tradespeople and Tubissime, so the running costs we describe are ones we pay ourselves every month. If you are weighing a studio in another country, our guide to outsourcing development to a European studio covers what changes and what to check.