Pricing Guide

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.

Your information is kept private and will never be shared.

Prefer to reach out directly?

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