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Pricing

What does it cost to build software?

Everyone says “it depends.” Here’s what it depends on, and the number at each stage.

$4,500Discovery starts here, paid once
$250/moRunning it after launch, month to month

Three pieces, each priced on its own. Discovery is $4,500 and ends with a scope and a fixed build price. Half of it comes off the build. The build starts at $18,000, quoted once version one is defined. Running it is $250 to $1,800 a month, for as long as you want it.

Book a scoping call

30 minutes, no pitch, and you keep the plan either way.

Numbers last checked . If one is out of date, we quote you the lower of the two.

What the manual version is already costing you

Someone on your team spends the last hour of every day copying orders from WhatsApp into a spreadsheet. That hour never shows up on an invoice, so it feels free. It’s a salary, paid monthly, for work a computer does for nothing.

Then there’s the growth it blocks: the second location, the client you turn away because onboarding by hand takes a week.

You know what those hours are worth. Hold that number next to ours.

The build, priced in stages

A product can’t be priced from one conversation. So we price the step that produces the quote.

Discovery is sold on its own. It ends with a written scope, a clickable prototype, a technical plan and a fixed build price. All of it is yours, and any competent team can build from it. Half the fee ($2,250) comes off the build if you go ahead.

Discovery Sprint

$4,500paid once

One to two weeks with you and, where it matters, your users. We decide what version one includes, what it leaves out and what it costs to build.

MVP Build

from$18,000

The first version people can sign up for and pay for. Accounts, roles, the core workflow, Stripe billing and launch on infrastructure in your name. One product, one customer type, one payment processor.

Platform Build

from$40,000

Multi-tenant or white-label, several user types, integrations with systems you already run, tiered or usage-based billing, a public API and real reporting. Quoted after discovery.

“From” is the floor. Discovery sets the exact number, and if it’s higher you’ll know why before you say yes.

One build at a time. The founder is on every project. When the slot is taken, this page says so and names the next opening.

What version one does, and where it stops

Version one is a finished product. It runs, people sign up, cards get charged, and the manual work happens by itself. You own the code and every account it runs on. For many businesses that’s the whole purchase.

It won’t find you customers. The launch surface (marketing site, pricing page, emails) is separate work with its own quote.

After it launches

Left alone, a product rots. It starts in the six weeks after launch, while you’re busy selling it. A dependency needs a security patch. Stripe changes something. A screen fails on an old phone, and a customer quietly stops paying.

The monthly plans handle that. Hosting is inside every tier. When something breaks, the person who built it answers. Month to month: no twelve-month minimum, no cancellation fee.

Leaving doesn’t cost you the work. The repository, cloud account, domain and payment processor are in your name from day one. Sign-off transfers the rest, usually within 24 to 48 hours. Cancel the plan later and it keeps running wherever you put it.

Run Essential

$250/month

Hosting, SSL, dependency and security updates, backups tested by restoring them, uptime monitoring and fixes when something breaks.

Run Standard

$650/month

Everything above, plus up to three hours of changes a month (a field, a report, a small screen) and a monthly note in plain language on uptime, sign-ups and usage.

Product Partner

$1,800/month

Everything above, plus up to ten hours of new work a month and a roadmap re-cut each month against real usage. Unused hours don’t roll over.

Not in any monthly tier: a rebuild or redesign · a second product · a move to a different stack · features big enough to need their own scope · the paid infrastructure and third-party bills themselves. Each gets its own quote.

The launch surface is quoted per product

The marketing site, pricing page, sign-up funnel, lifecycle emails, search and analytics. We build all of it. The scope swings too much for one figure: five pages or twenty, one language or two. You get a fixed number before anything starts.

Book a scoping call

30 minutes, no pitch, and you keep the plan either way.

What’s not in the number

Every software quote has a second page. Here’s ours.

  • The infrastructure bill. Hosting, database, storage, email delivery. Inside a monthly plan at normal usage; otherwise billed straight to your account. You see the estimate first.
  • Third-party subscriptions and fees. Stripe’s cut per transaction, plus email, SMS, maps or AI tokens. Billed to you at cost, estimated before you commit.
  • The domain. We build on yours or register one in your account. The yearly fee is yours, shown before we buy.
  • App store fees and developer accounts. Apple and Google charge yearly to publish and take their cut.
  • Formal compliance certification. We document how the product handles personal data and hand that to you. The audit and certificate come from an auditor.
  • A staffed support desk for your customers. We build the help center, onboarding and docs. The person answering chat at 9pm is yours.
  • Brand identity from scratch. We work with what you have. Building one is its own project.
  • A promise about how much money the product will make. That can’t be promised, so we don’t.

Always included: a fixed quote before work starts, both languages and the founder on the build. Two rounds of changes too, one at design and one before launch, each a list of any length. Fixing our misreads doesn’t use a round. Out-of-scope work is quoted and approved before it happens.

What happens after you pick a number

  1. You book the scoping call. Thirty minutes, free. You hear what it would take, or that a $30-a-month tool already does it.
  2. You keep the plan. Written up and yours, whether or not you hire us.
  3. Discovery, if it’s worth building. One to two weeks, paid on its own.
  4. You approve the build number before any code is written. It only moves if you add scope, and you see the new number first.
  5. We build it in sprints. Each ends with something you can click. The person from step one does the work.
  6. It launches, and you decide about monthly. Separately, once you’ve seen how we work. The build never requires a plan.

The things you’re thinking right now

Can’t I just use an off-the-shelf tool?

Often, yes, and we’ll say so on the call. Custom pays off when what you do differently is the business, or when the software is the product. If a $40-a-month tool covers 80%, buy that.

Mi sobrino sabe programar.

He can probably build it. But who patches it in eighteen months, once he has a full-time job and your customers’ cards are in the database? Bring his plan to the call. If it holds up, we’ll tell you to keep it.

Ya me amarré con una agencia una vez.

Twelve-month contracts and code held hostage on someone else’s server will do that. Here everything is in your name from day one, and the plan is month to month.

¿Y si desaparecen a mitad del proyecto?

The repository and accounts are yours from day one. You see work every sprint and pay per delivered stage, not one lump up front. If we vanished, another developer could pick it up on Monday.

Why put prices on the page at all?

So you don’t sit through a sales call to hear a number. If our floor is over your budget, we both know in ten seconds.

Can you do it for less?

Not by discounting. What we will do is cut scope with you: version one gets smaller and the price follows it down.

Ready when you are

Start with the free half hour.

You’ll leave knowing what version one is, roughly what it takes, and whether to build it at all.

Book a scoping call

30 minutes, no pitch, and you keep the plan either way.

© 2026 The Idealize L.L.C. · San Juan, PR