Software in five days instead of a €15,000 quote

What it cost in 2020

A custom booking system with reminders, roles and a simple report was a €15,000 to €30,000 project with a three to six month timeline. Nobody was overcharging. That is what the hours cost.

Work out where the money went and the number stops looking outrageous. Requirements gathering, design, front end, back end, database, authentication, deployment, testing, a round of changes, handover. Every one of those was a person typing, and the person had to be paid whether the finished thing turned out to be right or not.

The result was a straightforward filter: if the problem was not worth fifteen thousand euro, it did not get solved. Most problems in a company of thirty people are not worth fifteen thousand euro, which is why so many of them are still running on a spreadsheet.

Which part got cheaper

The making. Turning a settled decision into working software went from weeks of typing to hours. The deciding — what the system should do, for whom, with which rules — cost exactly what it always did.

This matters more than it sounds, because it changes what you should spend your own time on. If you have five days, you are no longer choosing between building it yourself and hiring someone. You are choosing how much of those five days goes into being precise about what you want, because that is now the expensive half.

A useful way to hold it: the price of a wrong description used to be hidden inside a long project and paid for in change requests. Now it surfaces on day one, which is uncomfortable and much cheaper.

An agency quote against a template plus a description

The two differ in price, in speed, and in who carries the responsibility for the description. That third one is the difference people notice last and feel most.

Where the saved money actually goes

It does not disappear. It moves into the description, and into the weeks after launch when the software meets people who did not write it.

Budget for that honestly. Someone in the company has to own the thing: decide the rules, answer the questions the team asks in the first fortnight, and say what changes. That person costs hours. They cost fewer hours than fifteen thousand euro, but they are not free, and a plan that pretends otherwise fails in the second month.

The number that matters is not the licence fee. It is hours saved per week against hours spent per week, and you should be able to write both down before you start.

When the agency is still the cheaper answer

When the system is genuinely complex, has to integrate deeply with something you already run, or sits inside a regulated process where a wrong answer costs money.

If your project is one of those, an agency quote of €15,000 is not the expensive option — it is the accurate one, and going the other way will cost you the fifteen thousand plus the time you spent finding out. We would rather say that here than in month three.

The line is roughly this: if you can describe the whole thing to a new colleague in one sitting, and being wrong about it costs you inconvenience rather than money, it belongs here. If not, hire someone.

The numbers on this site

Plans run from €29 a month for 1,500 credits to €249 for 15,000, VAT included, with a Bulgarian invoice. If you would rather not build it yourself, we will, for a one-off between €1,200 and €3,500 agreed before anything starts.

The free week is ten thousand credits over seven days with no card, and it starts when you begin your first system rather than when you register — so a week spent reading does not eat the week you meant to build in.