A straight answer to the question everyone asks and few answer honestly — what you'll really pay, what drives the number, and where the money goes long after launch.
"How much does custom software cost?" is the first question we get asked, and it's the one most developers dodge with "it depends." It does depend — but that's not an answer you can plan a budget around. So here's a straight one: the honest ranges, what pushes a project to the top or bottom of them, and where the money goes long after launch. We've been scoping and building this kind of work in Australia since 2001 — custom applications, ERP and data projects — so these are real numbers, not brochure figures.
One warning before the numbers: anyone who quotes you a firm price before understanding your problem is guessing. Treat the ranges below as a way to place yourself in the right ballpark — not as a quote.
Most custom projects in Australia fall into three broad bands. Where you land depends far less on "how many screens" and far more on how many moving parts your business has.
| Project | Typical range | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| A focused tool | $15k – $50k | One team, one job — a booking system, an inspection app, a quoting tool. Does one thing well, with few or no integrations. |
| A business system | $50k – $150k | Several connected workflows, a handful of integrations, and different types of user — a custom operations platform, a customer portal, a field app feeding a back office. |
| A company-wide platform or ERP | $150k + | Touches most of the business, migrates years of data, and ties finance, inventory and operations together. Large rollouts run well past this. |
The gap between the bottom and the top of a band is mostly these six things:
ERP deserves its own note, because the sticker price is the part people worry about and rarely the part that hurts. An ERP touches how the whole business runs, so the real cost sits in three places most quotes gloss over: migrating and cleaning years of data, integrating the systems you're keeping, and change management — getting your team to actually work the new way.
There's also a fork in the road worth naming early: do you configure an existing ERP platform to fit, or build custom around your own process? It's usually the single biggest lever on the final bill — we wrote a separate honest guide to exactly that decision: Build, buy or configure?.
Here's the line item that quietly turns a good decision into a bad one when it's ignored: software isn't finished at launch. Plan for roughly 10–25% of the build cost each year to keep it healthy — hosting, security patches, support, and the improvements you'll want once real people are using it.
Skip that and you don't save the money; you defer it, and it comes back bigger. Over the five years you'll actually use the thing, ongoing costs often rival the original build.
The number that matters isn't the build price. It's the total over the years you'll actually run it.
Three common models, and when each earns its place:
The pattern worth insisting on is that last one: a paid discovery phase before anyone commits to a build price. It's the cheapest money you'll spend on the whole project, and it's what turns "it depends" into a number you can take to your board.
That's how we scope every job — a straight ballpark early, a paid discovery to make it real, and an honest word if we think the cheaper path is off-the-shelf. When we do build, you own it, it runs on Australian infrastructure, and we're here to support it long after launch.
Tell us what you're trying to fix and we'll give you an honest range for your situation — not a figure pulled from the air.