The floor price of custom software

For most of the last thirty years, a custom software project had two problems before it had a single line of code: what it cost, and how you paid for it.

The number

The number was high because building software was almost entirely human labor, and human labor is expensive and slow. A genuinely custom integration — the kind that connects the tools a real business already runs — sat somewhere north of forty thousand dollars, often well north. For a small business, that isn't a line item. It's a bet the whole year turns on.

What changed is narrow and specific. The repetitive ninety percent of building software — the wiring, the boilerplate, the testing, the deploying — can now be done by agents, quickly and around the clock. The remaining ten percent, the judgment, still needs a person. So the price of the ninety percent collapsed, and the price of the whole thing came down with it. The quality bar did not move. Who does the tedious part did.

The structure

The second problem was how you paid. The industry standard was a large deposit — commonly half the total, up front, before you'd seen anything work. That structure exists to protect the builder from the risk of the project, and it pushes that risk entirely onto the customer.

We think the risk should sit closer to us. So the money is structured three ways:

• Standard — a start cost that covers our costs and a monthly number you can plan around. No five-figure deposit.
• Build-to-Own — a modest start cost, the build amortized into the monthly, and full ownership of the code transferred to you the moment it's paid off. You are buying an asset, not renting one indefinitely.
• First Flight — for early-stage businesses with more potential than capital. Lower start costs, patient terms, and a promise in writing: if the business doesn't make it, we waive what's left. We'd rather be your first partner than your biggest bill.

None of this requires you to know what your project should cost. That's our job to work out, and it starts with a five-minute conversation about what you're actually trying to build.