Every enquiry we get starts with some version of the same question, usually three or four messages in, phrased carefully as though it is rude to ask.
"Roughly what would something like this cost?"
It is not rude. It is the only sensible question. And the fact that you have to fight to get an answer is the most annoying thing about hiring a software company.
So here is ours, in public, with the reasoning attached.
Why nobody puts prices on the website
Two honest reasons and one dishonest one.
The honest ones first. Custom software genuinely varies. A billing system for a single shop and a billing system for six branches with a central warehouse are the same sentence and a five-fold difference in work. And a lot of the cost is decided by things the client controls — how clear the requirements are, how fast decisions come back, whether the old data is clean.
The dishonest reason is that some firms want to see your office before they price the job. Bigger shop, bigger number.
We would rather give you a range and be held to it.
The three things that decide the price
Everything else is detail.
1. How many people use it, and how differently. A tool for two people at a counter is small. The same tool for a counter, a store room, an accountant and an owner who wants reports on his phone is four different screens, four sets of permissions, and four ways to get it wrong. Roles multiply work faster than features do.
2. What it has to talk to. Software that stands alone is cheap. Software that must connect to a GST portal, a payment gateway, WhatsApp, a barcode scanner, Tally or a bank statement is not. Every connection is somebody else's rules, somebody else's downtime, and somebody else's surprise change six months later.
3. What happens if it is wrong. A system that mis-prints a delivery note causes an argument. A system that mis-calculates PF or files a wrong GST return causes a notice. Money and statutory work need more checking, more testing and more careful handling, and that is real time.
Notice that none of the three is "how many screens". Clients estimate in screens. Cost lives in roles, connections and consequences.
Real ranges
These are the bands we actually work in. They assume a working system, your data loaded, your staff trained, and three months of support after launch.
A focused single-purpose tool — ₹80,000 to ₹2,00,000
One job done properly. A quotation builder, a service-call tracker, a visitor register, a complaints desk. One or two roles, no statutory calculation, minimal integration. Four to eight weeks.
A billing or POS system — ₹2,50,000 to ₹6,00,000
Counter billing, stock, customers, GST-compliant invoices, daily reports. The range depends almost entirely on whether your stock behaves normally. Ordinary items with fixed prices sit at the bottom. Items priced by weight and daily rates, or serial-numbered stock where each piece is unique, sit at the top, because then every sale is a small calculation rather than a lookup.
A full ERP for one business — ₹6,00,000 to ₹18,00,000
Purchase, stock, production, sales, payments, payroll and reporting, working as one thing. Three to six months. This is where most of our work sits, and where the range is widest, because "full ERP" means something different in every industry.
Statutory and compliance work — add ₹1,50,000 to ₹4,00,000
E-invoicing with IRN and QR codes, e-way bills, PF ECR files, ESI returns, TDS and 24Q. Priced separately because it is a different kind of work: the rules are published, unforgiving, and change without asking you.
Mobile app alongside the system — add ₹2,00,000 to ₹5,00,000
Only worth it when people genuinely work away from a desk — field staff, delivery, site supervisors. If everyone sits at a counter, a phone-friendly website does the same job for a fraction of the money.
Ongoing support — ₹8,000 to ₹25,000 a month
Hosting, backups, fixes, small changes, and someone answering the phone when something breaks on a Saturday.
Before you spend any of that: do not build
The most useful thing on this page is the part that talks you out of it.
Buy ready-made if your business works like other businesses. If you sell ordinary goods at ordinary prices to ordinary customers, Zoho, Vyapar, Marg or Busy will do it for a few thousand rupees a year. They have thousands of users finding bugs for you. Nothing we build will beat that on price, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Stay on Tally if accounting is genuinely all you do. Tally is very good at what it is for. The mistake is trying to make it run your operations.
Do not build to fix a process problem. If two people disagree about who approves a purchase, software will not settle it. It will encode the argument and make it permanent. Sort the process first, on paper, then automate the version that works.
Do not build because a competitor did. Their constraints are not yours.
So when is custom actually right
There is a clear test, and it has nothing to do with company size.
Build custom when the thing that makes you money is the thing no package supports.
Some real shapes of that, from work we have done:
A jeweller whose every sale is a live calculation — today's gold rate, this item's making charge, the customer's old gold valued at the right purity, a running scheme instalment, then GST applied in a specific order. No off-the-shelf POS does that, because outside the trade it makes no sense.
A construction contractor paying forty crews across several sites, where a week's wages depends on attendance, on rates that vary by trade, and on PF and ESI rules that change by slab. The payroll packages assume salaried staff at one location.
A distributor whose true cost per item only appears after freight is split across a mixed lorry load by weight and volume. Until that split happens, nobody knows which lines are profitable.
In all three, the awkward part is the business. Force it into a standard package and you either stop doing the thing that makes you money, or you keep a parallel Excel file — which is the same as not having the software.
The second good reason is compound waste. If four people spend two hours a day each re-typing data between systems, that is roughly forty hours a week. Price that against a one-time build and the arithmetic usually answers itself within a year.
What makes a quote go up after it is given
Being honest about this is the same as being honest about the price.
Unclear scope. "It should also handle returns" sounds small and is not. Returns touch stock, accounts, GST and the customer's balance.
Slow decisions. A build has a rhythm. When a question waits three weeks for an answer, the work does not pause neatly — it has to be picked up again, and that costs real hours.
Dirty old data. Nearly every project meets this. Four spellings of the same supplier, stock counts nobody trusts, opening balances that do not tie. Cleaning it is unavoidable and rarely budgeted.
Integrations nobody mentioned. "It just needs to connect to our bank" arriving in month three is not a small sentence.
We quote in stages for exactly this reason. You approve a scope and a number, we build that, and anything new is priced separately before it starts. No surprises at the end, on either side.
How to compare two quotes that are far apart
You will get quotes that differ by three times for what sounds like the same job. That gap is almost never about greed. It is about what each firm has quietly left out. Five questions expose it.
"Who owns the code and the database?" If the answer is anything other than you, the low price is a subscription in disguise. The day you want to move, you start again. Get it in writing.
"What happens to my existing data?" Migration is a real project inside the project. A quote that does not mention it has not counted it, and you will meet that cost later with no leverage.
"What is included after go-live?" Nobody launches a system without needing changes in the first month. Ask how long support lasts, what counts as a fix versus a new request, and what it costs after that.
"Who trains my staff, and how?" A system nobody can use is money spent on nothing. Somebody has to sit with your counter staff. Ask who, for how long, and whether there is a written guide afterwards.
"Where does it run, and who holds the backups?" Hosting, domain, SSL and backups are small costs that become large problems when nobody owns them. And a backup nobody has ever restored is not a backup.
A cheaper quote that answers all five well is genuinely cheaper. A cheaper quote that answers none of them is a deposit on an argument.
What a fair quote should contain
Ours has six things on it, and yours should too: the exact scope in plain language, what is explicitly not included, the stages and what you approve at each one, the timeline, the payment points, and what happens after launch.
If a quote is one line and one number, you have nothing to hold anybody to — including yourself.
Why our numbers are lower than a metro agency's
You will find quotes two to three times the ranges above, from firms in Bengaluru, Mumbai or Pune, for the same work. We are not cutting corners to sit below them. The difference is structural, and you can check every part of it.
We are in Udupi. Our rent and our salaries are a fraction of what a Bengaluru agency carries, and that difference goes into the quote rather than into an office.
You talk to the person building it. No account manager, no project coordinator, no layer relaying your requirements to someone who never meets you. Every layer in between is billable, and every layer loses detail.
We do not start from zero. Logins, roles and permissions, GST-compliant invoicing, PDF generation, e-invoicing with IRN and QR, backups, audit trails — these are already built and already running in live systems. A new project begins with that foundation tested rather than written again. That is the single biggest reason our ERP numbers look low: a large part of the hard work happened on an earlier project years ago, and you are not paying for it twice.
Nobody earns commission on your project. There is no salesperson whose income depends on the number being bigger.
What does not get cut: you own the code and the database outright, the system is tested before it reaches your staff, your people get trained, and support terms are written down. Those are not the expensive parts. Layers of management are.
How to get a real number for your own case
You do not need a specification document. You need to be able to answer four things:
- What breaks today? The actual daily annoyance, not the grand vision.
- Who touches it? How many people, in how many different roles.
- What must it connect to? Tally, GST portal, payment gateway, WhatsApp, scanner, bank.
- What happens if it gets something wrong? An awkward conversation, or a government notice.
Answer those four and any competent developer can give you a real range in one conversation. If they cannot, or will not, that is useful information about them.
Common questions
How much does custom software cost in India?
For a small business, a focused single-purpose tool runs ₹80,000 to ₹2,00,000, a billing or POS system ₹2,50,000 to ₹6,00,000, and a full ERP ₹6,00,000 to ₹18,00,000. Statutory compliance work and a mobile app are priced on top. Metro agencies typically quote two to three times these figures for the same scope.
Is custom software cheaper than Zoho or Tally?
No, and it never will be. A subscription package costs a few thousand rupees a year because thousands of businesses share the development cost. Custom only wins when the package cannot do the thing your business actually makes money from, or when the manual work around the package costs more each year than the build costs once.
How long does a custom ERP take to build?
Three to six months for a single business, assuming decisions come back within a few days and your existing data is in reasonable shape. A focused single-purpose tool is four to eight weeks. The most common cause of delay is not development speed — it is waiting for answers.
Who owns the code when I pay for custom software?
You should, completely, including the database. Ask for it in writing before you sign anything. If a developer keeps ownership, you are renting, and the price of leaving is starting again from nothing.
Should I build custom software or buy a ready-made package?
Buy ready-made if your business works the way most businesses work. Build custom when the awkward, specific part of your operation is also the part that earns the money — and no package supports it without a parallel Excel file.
What we will tell you for free
Send us the four answers above. We will come back with a range, a rough timeline, and — genuinely — whether we think you should build at all.
We turn down work fairly often, usually because a ready-made package will do the job for a tenth of the money. That is not generosity. A client who should have bought Zoho and was sold a custom build instead is an unhappy client for years, and we would rather not have one.
If custom is right for you, you will know why, in writing, before you spend anything.
Whirl Designs builds custom business software from Udupi — billing and POS, ERP, statutory compliance, and the awkward parts no package covers. Tell us what breaks today.
