Dublin, Ohio · Columbus metroBuilding software since 2008AWS Select Tier Partner

(614) 768-3887

What Custom Software Actually Costs

Most firms make you sit through a sales call to hear a number. We'd rather you walk in knowing the landscape. These are the real ranges we quote — and the factors that move a project from one end to the other.

Get a Precise Estimate

Why we publish our pricing

Almost no development firm publishes prices. The usual excuse — "every project is different" — is true, but it's not a reason to hide the ranges. You budget better, we both skip mismatched conversations, and the first call starts on substance instead of suspense.

  • Ranges are ranges. A "simple" project with one nasty integration can cost more than a "complex" one with none. The drivers under each table explain what moves the number.
  • These are 2026 figures for a senior, US-based team. You get senior engineers without coastal agency rates, but these aren't offshore prices. If a quote elsewhere is a third of these, ask who's actually writing the code — and who fixes it in year two.

MVP & Custom Web Applications

Scope
Typical range
Timeline
Focused MVP — one core workflow, standard auth, admin basics
$40k–$85k
8–12 weeks
Standard MVP — multiple roles, payments, notifications, reporting
$85k–$175k
3–5 months
Complex platform — multi-tenant, heavy integrations, real-time, or compliance
$175k–$400k+
5–9 months

What moves the number: scope discipline (the biggest driver — the Roadmapping Workshop exists to cut it), integrations, compliance requirements (CJIS/HIPAA/SOC 2 add roughly a 25–50% premium over an equivalent non-regulated build), and team composition.

Mobile Apps

Scope
Typical range
Companion app — mobile front end for an existing platform
$50k–$100k
Standalone product — full iOS + Android app with its own backend
$100k–$250k
Complex mobile platform — offline sync, hardware/Bluetooth, video, regulated data
$250k+

What moves the number: native vs. cross-platform, the backend (usually half the project), offline and sync requirements, and app store operations.

AI Integration & Machine Learning

Scope
Typical range
AI feature in an existing product — summarization, extraction, assisted workflows
$25k–$75k
RAG system on your private data — ingestion, embeddings, retrieval, evaluation
$50k–$150k
AI voice agent — inbound calls, scheduling, CRM integration
$60k–$175k
Agent workflows / enterprise AI platform
$150k+

What moves the number: your data (clean data makes RAG cheap; messy data is where the budget goes), evaluation and observability, compliance and governance, and platform choice. Plus ongoing model/infra cost — typically a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month depending on volume.

Managed Hosting & Support (monthly)

Tier
Typical monthly
Fits
Essential — hosting, monitoring, patching, backups
$750–$2,000/mo
Launched MVPs and internal tools
Growth — + staging, performance tuning, priority SLA
$2,000–$5,000/mo
Growing products with real traffic
Compliance — + CJIS/HIPAA ops, audit logging, vuln management
$5,000–$12,000+/mo
Regulated systems and government work

AWS infrastructure costs are billed at cost from your own AWS account, separately from the management fee — so you always see what the cloud itself costs.

MVP Roadmapping Workshop — a fixed-price starting point

Not ready to commit five figures to a build? Start here. The workshop turns a big idea into a focused product plan: prioritized feature set, technical architecture, timeline, and a real budget for your project instead of a range on a web page.

Learn About the Workshop

Two Ways to Work Together

Beyond how we quote, there are two relationship models — and they apply whether you're a startup, a growing business, or an enterprise.

Market Rate

The standard vendor–client relationship

You pay our standard rates, and you own everything — the software, the IP, and the infrastructure. Clean, predictable, and no strings attached. This is how most engagements run.

  • Full ownership of code, IP, and AWS account
  • Predictable budgeting against the ranges above
  • No equity or revenue commitments

Partner Rate

We invest in your growth alongside you

When we believe in where a business is headed, we discount our services in exchange for a stake in the upside — equity, revenue share, or a combination. It aligns our incentives with yours: we do better when you do better.

  • Reduced cash cost in exchange for a stake
  • Structured as equity, revenue share, or a blend
  • Selective and by mutual fit — an option, never a requirement

Pricing FAQ

For a senior US-based team, a focused MVP typically runs $40,000–$85,000, a standard web application $85,000–$175,000, and complex or regulated platforms $175,000 and up. Mobile apps and production AI systems follow similar bands. The honest answer to "why such a wide range" is scope, integrations, and compliance — the three drivers this page breaks down.
Buy when a proven product covers 80%+ of your workflow and your process can bend to fit it. Build when the workflow is your competitive advantage, when off-the-shelf tools force expensive workarounds or per-seat fees that scale badly, or when no vendor meets your compliance requirements. Many of our SMB engagements start exactly there: five SaaS subscriptions and a spreadsheet holding them together, replaced by one system the business owns.
It's not the code — it's everything that makes the code dependable: design, architecture, security, testing, integrations, deployment infrastructure, and the senior people who've done it before. Cheap builds skip those layers, which is why so many companies come to us to rebuild a system that cost less the first time. The most expensive software is the version you have to build twice.
For most builds we lead with a transparent range, then tighten it as the scope locks. Part of that is honesty and part is how we work now: with AI accelerating our development process, effort is genuinely less predictable up front, and a padded fixed bid just charges you for that uncertainty. For truly locked scope we'll commit to a fixed number; for products that will evolve, time & materials lets you pay for exactly what's built.
Sometimes that works. But the quoted rate isn't the cost — rework, communication overhead, security gaps, and abandoned codebases are. Our Midwest cost structure is the middle path: senior US-based engineers, direct communication, and accountability you can drive to, without coastal agency rates.
Plan for roughly 15–20% of the build cost per year across hosting, monitoring, security patching, dependency updates, and small improvements. Our managed hosting tiers cover the operations side; ongoing feature development is scoped separately.

Get a Number for Your Actual Project

Ranges get you oriented. A 30-minute conversation gets you a real estimate — scope, timeline, and price for the thing you're actually building. We respond within one business day.

Prefer to reach out directly?

Rather skip the form? Grab a free 30-minute discovery call and we'll talk it through together.

hello@qstartlabs.com(614) 768-3887
6233 Riverside Drive, Suite 2S, Dublin, OH 43017 (Columbus metro) · serving clients nationwide

We reply within one business day.

Your information is kept private and will never be shared.