- A pilot, one workflow shipped to production, usually costs CAD $12,000 to $25,000. A full product, $30,000 to $60,000 and up.
- The first year all in, build plus operations, runs about $30,000 to $45,000 for a pilot and $50,000 to $80,000 for a full product.
- Price moves with the number of workflows, integrations, data migration, AI evaluation and a second language, not with the number of screens.
- Under about $10,000, custom software is the wrong purchase. Configure an off-the-shelf tool instead.
Pricing is the first thing a buyer looks for on a software studio’s site, and the thing most studios hide. This guide gives the numbers we quote, in Canadian dollars, and the reasons a quote lands where it does. It is written for the owner or operations lead of a business that runs on real revenue and is weighing its first custom build.
The short answer
Three brackets cover most of what we build.
- A pilot, one workflow or one feature shipped to production, usually lands between $12,000 and $25,000 and takes four to six weeks.
- A full product, a platform or a SaaS with several workflows, runs $30,000 to $60,000 and sometimes past it, over eight to sixteen weeks.
- Operations, the monthly plan that keeps the software running and improving after launch, starts at $1,500 a month.
Before any of that, a Discovery of one to two weeks costs $2,500 to $3,500. It produces the written specification, the fixed quote and the date. If the build goes ahead, the fee is credited against it. If it does not, the specification is yours, and any developer can build from it.
For a first-year picture, add the build and twelve months of operations: about $30,000 to $45,000 for a pilot, $50,000 to $80,000 and up for a full product.
What moves the price
Screens are not what you pay for. A quote moves with five things.
- Workflows. Each end-to-end path through the system, from a request coming in to a result going out, carries its own states, edge cases and permissions. A quoting tool with one path costs less than a portal with intake, approval and billing.
- Integrations. Every external system the software has to talk to, accounting, a CRM, a payment provider, a provincial registry, adds work that is mostly about the other system’s rules.
- Data migration. If a process lives in spreadsheets today, that data has to be cleaned and moved, and it is always dirtier than the sample suggests.
- AI features. Document processing or assisted workflows add evaluation work: measuring how often the model is right on your data, and keeping running costs visible. A demo skips this. A product cannot.
- A second language. Built in from the start, French and English cost little extra. Retrofitted, they cost a rebuild of forms, emails and content.
Compliance sits across all five. A Québec business collecting personal information has Law 25 obligations; a health or finance workflow has its own. These are design decisions, cheap early and expensive late.
Why quotes differ so much
Ask three vendors and the numbers can span a factor of five. Three reasons.
Hourly versus fixed. An hourly quote is an estimate; the invoice is the price. A fixed quote from a written specification moves the risk of being wrong to the builder, which is where it belongs. We only quote fixed.
Layers. A traditional agency carries an account manager, a project manager, a designer and a developer between you and the product. Each is a salary on the invoice and a handoff where information is lost. A studio where the person who scopes the product designs it and writes the code removes the layers, and part of the price.
Demo builders. AI tools can produce a working demo in an afternoon, and some shops price accordingly. What you are buying, though, is the part after the demo: real data, permissions, error handling, monitoring, and someone accountable when it breaks at 9 p.m. We wrote about that gap in The demo is not the product.
When not to build
Custom software is the wrong purchase in three cases, and a good studio will say so on the first call.
- The budget is under about $10,000. At that level, configure an off-the-shelf tool. A well-set-up form builder, CRM or scheduling product will serve you better than a thin custom build.
- There is no number. If nobody can say what the software should change, hours a week, turnaround time, cost per task, there is nothing to measure it against, and nothing to prioritise.
- The process is still changing every month. Build it when it has settled. Until then, the spreadsheet is the right tool.
How to buy it
The buying process protects you more than the price does.
- Pay for a specification first, and keep it whatever you decide.
- Get a fixed price and a date from that specification.
- Bill by milestone, so your exposure at any moment stays small.
- Own the repository and the infrastructure from day one.
- See working software every week, not status decks.
- Ship with monitoring, analytics and the number on a dashboard, then keep someone on it after launch.
Our services page lists all of it with the prices. If your project sits in one of these brackets, book a Discovery: one to two weeks, a written spec, a fixed quote and a date.
