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ENIt is the first question almost every small business asks us, and almost always before telling us what they need. That makes sense: nobody wants to request a quote blind, or sit through three meetings only to discover that the project costs three times what they could pay or will take six months.
The honest answer is "it depends". But "it depends" is no use for planning, so in this article we give you our price and timeline ranges for 2026, explain what makes a quote go up or down and why we can deliver in days what others deliver in months, and leave you a checklist for requesting quotes so you can compare providers without any surprises.
Price and timeline ranges by project type
These figures are ours: a small, senior team based in Madrid, with no sales structure to pay for, AI-assisted development and a proven base of components. A large consultancy or an agency with a city-center office will typically multiply them by two or three, and take twice as long. A junior profile or an offshore team may come in below them, with the risks we discuss further on. All amounts are excluding VAT.
| Project type | Indicative range | First working result | Final version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple automation or integration between two tools (for example, passing orders from the online shop to the invoicing software) | €1,500 - €4,000 | MVP in 3 days | 1 - 2 weeks |
| Internal web application with 3 to 6 screens (job sheets, inventory control, order management) | €4,000 - €12,000 | MVP in 3 days with the key screens | 3 - 5 weeks |
| Customer portal or private area with documents, payments and notifications | €8,000 - €25,000 | Working prototype in 3 days | 5 - 8 weeks |
| Mobile app for iOS and Android with its backend | €12,000 - €35,000 | Prototype on your phone in 1 week | 6 - 10 weeks |
| Business platform with several modules, roles, reports and ERP or CRM integrations | €25,000 - €70,000 | First module in use at 3 weeks | In phases, 3 - 5 months |
| Modernizing a legacy application (Access, Excel with macros, Visual Basic, unmaintained PHP) | €6,000 - €30,000 | Audit and migration plan in 3 days | 4 - 10 weeks |
If your project falls in the lower part of a range, it is usually because the process is very clear, there are few integrations and a single person makes the decisions. If it falls in the upper part, it is almost always for the opposite reasons.
Our commitment: a working MVP in 3 business days
Within 3 business days of kick-off you have a working minimum viable product: a complete automation or the key screens of your application, ready to test the idea with your team and with real data. From there, weekly deliveries until the final version.
An MVP is not the finished application, nor a drawing in a slide deck. It is the most painful part of your process, solved and usable, so you can decide with something in your hands. To meet the deadline we ask for three things, which also protect you:
- A bounded scope agreed in a one-hour kick-off meeting. Together we choose what goes into the 3 days and what comes later.
- Access to the data or systems from day one: an export, an API or a test user.
- A point of contact who replies the same day. No week-long waits for a two-minute question.
If any of the three is not possible, we say so before starting and agree on a timeline. What we do not do is promise 3 days and deliver in 3 weeks.
Why we can be faster and cheaper
It is not magic, and it is not cutting corners. It is a different way of working from the classic consultancy:
- A small, senior team with no middlemen. You talk to the people who build. You are not paying for sales reps, intermediate project managers or city-center offices.
- AI-assisted development. We use AI to generate, review and test code. What used to take a week of mechanical work now takes hours. The judgment, the architecture and the responsibility remain ours.
- A proven base of components. Authentication, permissions, forms, reports, common integrations. We do not start from scratch on every project; we start from what already works.
- Weekly deliveries and a single point of contact. Every week you see something new working and validate it. Changes of direction are caught in days, not months, and that is what really saves money.
What makes the price go up or down
Business rules, not screens
Two applications with the same five screens can cost twice as much as each other. What drives up the cost is not drawing a form, but everything that happens when someone clicks "save": validations, calculations, exceptions, statuses, alerts. An order app where "each customer has their own price list, except those in the Canary Islands, and orders over €5,000 are approved by management" has far more logic than one where everyone pays the same.
Integrations with what you already have
Connecting to your ERP, your CRM, the payment gateway, the e-signature platform or the accounting software is often a third of the quote. If the system has a documented API, it is manageable. If we have to read from an old database or export and import files, the cost goes up and so does the risk.
Users, roles and permissions
A tool for three office staff is not the same as one for forty technicians, ten sales reps and two hundred external customers. Each type of user adds permissions, screens and cases to test.
Custom design or template
For an internal tool, a clean design based on standard components is enough and saves between 10 and 20%. For a portal your customers will see, bespoke design shows and is worth it.
Legal and security requirements
GDPR, mandatory e-invoicing in Spain, traceability, backups, two-factor authentication, access auditing. None of this is optional if you handle customer data, and all of it adds hours.
Who decides, and how long they take to decide
The biggest cost driver in a project is not on the feature list: it is changing your mind halfway through. A single point of contact with decision-making authority and the availability to review each week's delivery saves more money than any rate negotiation.
What is not in the quote and you should ask about
- Maintenance. Between 10 and 15% of the development cost per year, or a bank of hours. Software that is not maintained degrades: dependencies with security flaws, browsers that change, integrations that stop working.
- Infrastructure. For a small business, between €20 and €150 a month in the cloud covers a typical application with backups. Ask who pays the bill and whose name the account is in.
- Third-party licenses. Payment gateway, SMS or email delivery, maps, e-signature. They are usually small, but it is worth knowing about them beforehand.
- Code ownership. The code must be yours and you must have access to the repository from day one. If a provider will not accept that, find another one.
- Exit. What happens if in two years you want to change provider. With documentation, your own code and infrastructure in your name, it is a formality. Without them, you are a hostage.
A concrete example: the job-sheet app for an installation company
Imagine an HVAC company in the Corredor del Henares, near Madrid, with fourteen technicians on the road. Today job sheets are filled in on paper, photos arrive by WhatsApp, and two people in admin spend the whole morning keying everything into the invoicing software. They invoice an average of eight days late and lose job sheets.
What they ask for: a mobile app so the technician can open the job sheet, have the customer sign it and attach photos; a web dashboard so the office can plan and review; and for closed jobs to flow automatically into the invoicing software.
Day 3: two technicians are already filling in job sheets on their phones, the customer signs on screen and the photos are attached. The office sees it all in a simple web list. With that, the company can check in one real week whether the workflow works before investing the rest. The full quote breaks down as follows:
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Kick-off and design (one-hour workshop and a working MVP in 3 days) | €900 |
| Mobile app for technicians (iOS and Android, works offline) | €5,800 |
| Web dashboard for planning and review | €3,400 |
| Integration with the invoicing software | €1,800 |
| Testing, training and go-live | €1,000 |
| Total | €12,900 + VAT, 6 weeks |
On top of that, around €120 a month for maintenance and infrastructure. Is it worth it? If the company recovers half a day of admin time and invoices six days earlier on average, the return comes in four to six months. That is the calculation to make before looking at the price.
How to request a quote so you get a good one
A good quote starts with a good request. With this checklist, any serious provider can give you a realistic figure within a few days, and you will be able to compare proposals properly.
- Describe the problem, not the solution. "We lose job sheets and invoice late" is worth more than "I want an app with a login and a dashboard".
- Say who will use it and how many of them there are. Technicians, office staff, customers, management. Every group counts.
- List what it needs to connect to. The name of the ERP, the CRM and the invoicing software, and whether they have an API.
- Prioritize in three columns: must-have, nice-to-have and later. The MVP only takes the top items of the first column.
- Ask for a breakdown by phase and exactly what maintenance includes.
- Ask about code ownership, hosting and exit. Get it in writing.
- Compare three proposals against the same document. If one is half the price of the others, ask what it has left out.
- Start small and fast. An MVP in 3 days and a first version in use within 3 or 4 weeks teach you more than six months of meetings.
And if the quote does not add up?
Sometimes custom development is not worth it, and an honest provider will tell you so. There are three alternatives we always review before proposing new code:
- An off-the-shelf tool that already solves 80% of your case for a monthly fee.
- A low-code solution for simple processes, costing between €1,000 and €3,000.
- Cutting the scope down to the essentials and expanding once the MVP has proven its value.
With us, a custom application for a small business costs, in most cases, between €4,000 and €25,000, with the first result working in 3 days and the final version in weeks, not months. What moves the figure is the business rules, the integrations and how clearly you arrive. Ask for a breakdown, code ownership and maintenance in writing, and start with an MVP.
Want to know what yours would cost?
Tell us about your case through the contact form using the checklist above. Within 48 hours we will tell you which range it falls into, what you would have working after 3 days and, if we think custom development is not worth it for you, we will tell you that too. You can see how we work on our custom software development page.