Guide · 4 min read
How much does custom software cost in the UK? (2026 prices)
Real UK prices for custom software in 2026: what an internal tool, a custom CRM or a full business system costs, what drives the price, and what you pay after launch.
Imaad MalikFounder and lead engineerShort answer
Most custom software for a UK small or mid-sized business costs between £10,000 and £60,000 for the first version. A focused internal tool or custom CRM usually lands at £10,000 to £30,000, and complex systems with many integrations run past £80,000. Expect to pay a few hundred pounds a day for ongoing improvements after launch.
In this post
I'm Imaad, founder of CRFTD Studios. Before anyone books a call with us, the question they most want answered is "roughly what will this cost?" Most agency websites dodge it. Here is the honest answer, with the numbers we and other UK agencies actually charge.
What does custom software cost in the UK?
Most first versions of a business system cost between £10,000 and £60,000. Where you land depends far more on what the system has to do than on who builds it.
| What you're building | Typical UK price | Typical time to go live |
|---|---|---|
| A focused internal tool (one team, one workflow) | £10,000 to £25,000 | 4 to 8 weeks |
| A custom CRM or booking system | £10,000 to £30,000 | 6 to 10 weeks |
| A full operations system (several teams, a customer portal, integrations) | £30,000 to £80,000 | 3 to 5 months |
| Complex or regulated systems (payments, healthcare, heavy integrations) | £80,000 and up | 5 months and up |
These ranges line up with what other UK agencies publish. Magora puts a first production release at £11,000 to £34,000, and Softomate quotes £15,000 to £40,000 for an internal tool.
Our own builds start from £6,000, at one fixed price agreed before we start. We keep that low by scoping tightly: a first version that does the few jobs that cost you the most time, then improving it month by month.
What makes the price go up or down?
Four things decide most of the cost:
- How many different people use it. One office team is simple. Office staff, drivers in the field and customers logging in each need their own screens and permissions.
- What it has to connect to. Each link to another system (Xero, Stripe, your phone system, a supplier's portal) adds days of work and testing.
- How much messy data has to move across. Ten years of spreadsheets with inconsistent columns takes real time to clean and import.
- How exact the rules are. "Assign the job to whoever is free" is easy. "Assign it to the nearest qualified engineer unless it's a priority customer on a weekend" is where the hours go.
What doesn't change the price much: the colour scheme, whether it's "an app" or "a website", or the tech stack. Those are details an engineer should sort out for you.
Why do agency quotes vary so much?
Two agencies can quote £15,000 and £60,000 for what sounds like the same thing because they are pricing different things. One has quoted the screens you described. The other has thought about the edge cases, data migration, testing and handover.
Ask every agency the same three questions:
- What exactly is in scope, written down?
- What happens if it takes longer than you planned? Who pays?
- What do I pay after launch, and who owns the code?
If the answers are vague, the low quote is not really low.
Fixed price or day rate?
For a first build, ask for a fixed price against a written scope. The agency then carries the risk of it taking longer, and you know your number before you commit. UK day rates run from about £350 to £900 per developer day (Softomate), so an open-ended day-rate project can drift by tens of thousands.
We quote one fixed price before we start and show you working software every Friday, so you always know where it stands. Day rates or a monthly plan make sense after launch, when the work is a stream of smaller improvements.
What does it cost after launch?
Software is never really finished. Your business changes, staff ask for new things, and the systems it connects to update. Budget for that from day one.
There are three common models:
| Model | What you pay | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Pay as you go | A day rate when something comes up | Very stable systems with few changes |
| Monthly plan | A fixed monthly fee for an agreed amount of work | Most businesses: steady improvements, predictable cost |
| "Unlimited" support | A flat fee | Rarely good value; work gets queued and capped |
Our CRFTD Care plan is the second kind: fixes, updates and new features every month from the team that built it, from £500 a month. Hosting stays in your name, so you pay the provider directly, usually a few pounds to a few hundred a month depending on use.
Is it worth it compared with off-the-shelf software?
Do the sum on time, not on licence fees. If five people each lose an hour a day to copying data between tools, chasing updates and fixing spreadsheet errors, that is around 1,150 hours a year. At £20 an hour that is £23,000 a year, every year, before you count mistakes and missed sales.
A £20,000 system that gives most of that time back pays for itself within about a year, and you stop paying per-seat fees for software that doesn't fit. If the numbers don't work that way for your business, an off-the-shelf tool is probably the right call, and we'll tell you so.
How to get an accurate price for your business
A good quote comes from mapping how work actually moves through your business today: who does what, where it gets stuck, and which tools are involved. That takes about 30 minutes on a call.
That is what our free Systems Map call is for. You leave with a fixed price and a plan, whether or not you build with us.
Questions people also ask.
A CRM built around how your team actually sells usually costs £10,000 to £30,000 for the first version. That compares with paying £50 to £150 per user per month for a big off-the-shelf CRM, forever, for features you mostly don't use.
UK agencies typically charge £350 to £900 per developer day, with London at the top of that range. Freelancers can be cheaper but you take on the risk of one person, and offshore teams can be £100 to £250 a day with more management on your side.
For a first build, a fixed price against a written scope is safer for the buyer, because the agency carries the risk of it taking longer. Hourly or day-rate work suits ongoing improvements once the system is live.
A focused business system usually takes 6 to 12 weeks to go live. You should see a working version within the first two or three weeks.
Sometimes, for a prototype. The cost shows up later: no-code tools charge per seat and hit limits as you grow, and AI-generated apps often break in ways nobody on your team can fix. If the business will run on it, have it built and reviewed by engineers.
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