What does custom software cost in India?
The honest answer is a rate card, not a range. Here is the one this studio works from, what pushes a project up or down it, and how the money moves.
For a small or mid-sized Indian business, custom software costs between ₹35,000 for a single-purpose storefront and ₹5,50,000 for a full operations platform, when it is built by an independent studio against a written, fixed scope. Most systems that replace a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group land between ₹75,000 and ₹3,00,000 and take two to six weeks.
Every price on the card
These are the studio's prices as printed on the homepage. They are the price of the scope described, not a starting figure that grows.
| What | Price | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Audit and direction. What is broken, what it costs, what to build first. | ₹60,000 onwards | 5 days |
| Storefront and landing. A single-purpose site on your own domain. | ₹35,000 onwards | 5 to 8 days |
| Lead capture system. Counter to database. | ₹75,000 onwards | 1 to 2 weeks |
| Security and resilience audit. Who can read what they should not, fixed before you are told. | ₹1,50,000 onwards | 8 to 10 days |
| Integration and automation. Your tools passing information between themselves. | ₹1,05,000 onwards | 1 to 2 weeks |
| Team enablement. Your developers, working the way this studio works. | ₹1,25,000 onwards | 1 week |
| AI agents and document automation. Paperwork read and acted on without a person. | ₹2,25,000 onwards | 2 to 4 weeks |
| App foundation. Logins, roles, billing, admin. A codebase you own. | ₹2,75,000 onwards | 2 weeks |
| AI and computer vision build. Cameras you already own, finally watched. | ₹3,00,000 onwards | 3 to 6 weeks |
| DPDP compliance engineering. Consent recorded, deletion that cascades, retention that runs itself. | ₹3,50,000 onwards | 3 to 5 weeks |
| Operations platform. Multi-tenant, roles, billing, records, monitoring. | ₹5,50,000 onwards | 4 to 8 weeks |
| Care. Fixes, updates, monitoring. | ₹25,000 a month | rolling |
| Build-with. A fixed number of change days every month. | ₹65,000 a month | rolling |
| Technical partner. On call, in your planning, shipping continuously. | ₹1,20,000 a month | rolling |
What actually moves the price
- How many different kinds of people use it. One login type is a storefront. Owner, staff, customer and guard, each seeing something different, is an operations platform. Every role roughly adds a third.
- What it has to talk to. Tally, Zoho, Razorpay, WhatsApp, a camera system. Each integration is a week of work and a lifetime of small changes, which is why it is priced as its own tier.
- Whether anything is live. A dashboard that refreshes when you reload is cheap. One where every screen updates the instant a reading changes is a different architecture.
- Whether it reads the messy world. Invoices, camera feeds, bank SMS, handwritten forms. Anything a person can read in a second and a computer usually cannot is the expensive part, and the part worth paying for.
- Not the number of pages, and not the design. People expect these to dominate. They rarely do.
Why quotes vary so much
Three reasons. Most quotes are estimates of hours, not prices for outcomes, so the number is a guess with a margin on it. An agency's quote carries a project manager, an account manager and the agency's margin on top of the person actually writing the code. And a quote without a written scope can only ever be a starting figure, because nobody has agreed what finished means.
A fixed price against a written scope moves the risk of an overrun onto the builder. If it takes longer than promised, that is the builder's problem and not your invoice.
How payment works here
40 / 40 / 20. Forty percent to begin. Forty percent when a working build is in your hands, doing the job. Twenty percent only after handover, when the code and the credentials are yours. Something working is in your hands every Friday in between, so if week two is going wrong we fix it in week three while it is still cheap.
What you own at the end
The code, the credentials, the domain, the database. Everything sits in a repository in your name, documented, with no service only the studio can log into. There is no per-user monthly fee, ever, because you are buying a system rather than renting seats.
Want a number for your thing?
Twenty minutes on a call. What breaks today, and what it costs you. Then a written scope with a price and a date.