Pricing
One fixed price, settled after it works
Your price is fixed when you sign off the 3-day prototype. You make a set-up payment of ₹20K-50K at sign-off, deducted from the price, and pay the rest once, after your acceptance test (UAT) passes. Hosting and support are free for the first 6 months. For the build there are no day rates, no milestone invoices and no billed meetings.
The prototype fixes the price. You see it working within 3 days, and agree it once it is revised. That agreement fixes the scope and the price. A set-up payment at sign-off comes off it, and the rest is paid once, after your acceptance test passes. From that point the price does not move unless you ask for a change.
Typical prices
What a build usually costs
Your own price is fixed when you sign off your prototype. Until then, this is the size most of our builds come to, with three examples of what it buys. Each is a 3-day prototype, then one month.
₹3 lakh to ₹5 lakh
Our usual size of build: an entire system, built end to end and running in production. It is a guide, not a quote.
-
One system for your team's daily work
For a business that runs on spreadsheets, paper and WhatsApp chats.
- Stock, orders, customers or bookings in one place
- Your Excel sheets imported, with an undo
- Approvals and tasks: who does what, by when
- Daily and monthly reports, with recommended actions
- From our work
- A client build, being built now: an inventory and forecasting system that puts a retailer's 9 stores and its head office on the same view.
- Good to know
- A lot of messy old data is scoped during the prototype and priced separately if it is large.
-
A system your customers use
For a business whose customers book, order or ask by phone and chat.
- Booking or ordering on your own WhatsApp number, or on the web
- Answers from your own price list, handed to a person when unsure
- Reminders and follow-ups that go out by themselves
- A screen where your staff see the day and step in
- From our work
- Our own product: a booking and enquiry receptionist, with 500+ appointments booked and 2,000+ enquiries answered in chat.
- Good to know
- AI model, WhatsApp and SMS charges are passed on at cost, on top of the build price.
-
A start-up's first product
For a founder with an idea, or a company adding a product to what it already does.
- Sign-in and the core workflow your users come for
- The admin screens your team runs it from
- Built to grow, and free to move to any cloud
- Code, tests and documentation that are yours on payment
- From our work
- A client build: an investor radar for an advisory firm, with 1,000+ investor firms checked again regularly.
- Good to know
- A larger product is scoped in stages. The first release still goes live in a month, and later releases are priced before work starts.
Maintenance and the production server, after the first 6 months
Starts from ₹3K a month.
The first 6 months of hosting and support are inside the build price. Third-party fees come on top, passed on at cost: what that covers.
How the price works
One number, and what it covers
Everything about the price, line by line. For the build there is one set-up payment at sign-off, then no day rates, no milestone invoices and no billed meetings. Discovery and the first prototype, with two revisions, are free.
-
Discovery, if you need it
Free
For when the direction is not clear yet: you know the problem, but not what the software should do. We work it out with you until there is a scope a prototype can be built from.
Discovery is free, and so is the first prototype, with two revisions. Once it is clear what done looks like, we set one fixed price. If you already know what you need, you skip it and start at the prototype.
-
The prototype
3 days
A working, clickable version on a link within 3 days: every screen your users will touch, on sample data, with the rules written beside each screen: the first draft of the scope list.
Nothing is due for the first prototype, and two revisions of it are free.
-
The fixed price
One number
Set at prototype sign-off, against the scope list. One number for the whole build, from design to the first 6 months of hosting and support.
One build · one number
- Scoping call, 30 minutes
- Included
- Working prototype, 3 days
- Included
- Design
- Included
- Development
- Included
- Automated testing
- Included
- Security review (with a controlled attempt to break in)
- Included
- Going live
- Included
- Hosting and support, first 6 months
- Included
- Fixed price, set at prototype sign-off
- One number
- Set-up payment at sign-off, deducted from the price
- ₹20K-50K
- Due when your acceptance test passes
- The rest
Change requests: written, priced, built on your yes.
Passed on at cost, with nothing marked up: AI models (LLMs), voice models, SMS and WhatsApp charges once live, and third-party licences. -
Payment
At sign-off, then after it passes
At sign-off you make a set-up payment of ₹20K-50K. It covers the AI usage and the servers your build runs on, and it is deducted from the fixed price.
You then test the finished system against the scope list you signed off. If it passes, you pay the rest, once. If it does not, we fix it and you test again. There are no other payments along the way: the rest is not due until it passes.
-
Change requests
Fixed per item
Anything outside the scope list. Each one is written down, priced as a fixed item before any work starts, and built only on your yes. It joins the build or follows it, your choice. Small ones are often free; we will say which.
A change beyond the agreed prototype, for example
- Send a WhatsApp reminder the day before each appointment
- Add a second user role, with its own screens
- Export the monthly report to Excel
- Accept a new upload format from a supplier
How each one is priced Fixed agreed before work starts
Each price is set per build. Where changes sit in the month: how it works.
A bug found during your acceptance test is never a change request. It is ours to fix.
-
Hosting and support
Free for 6 months
The hosting environment, nightly encrypted backups with a rehearsed restore, security updates, and fixes for anything that stops working as agreed. New features are change requests. No servers to buy, no IT team needed.
By default it runs on a small cloud server we look after; for Indian clients, on a server in India. Your own servers or a private cloud are possible too. How we host it and look after it.
The first 6 months are free. After that, the price for maintenance and the production server starts from ₹3K a month.
-
Third-party fees
Passed on at cost
AI models (LLMs), voice models, SMS and WhatsApp charges once the system is live, with nothing marked up. Third-party licences too, and hosting above the standard size if your traffic needs it.
-
What we will not do
Never
- Charge for each user (sell seats).
- Bill for meetings.
- Charge day rates. Discovery and the first prototype are free, and the build is one fixed price.
- Supply people by the hour to join another team.
- Take a project where software is the wrong answer. We say so on the scoping call.
Where the saving comes from
Why it costs about a fifth
A conventional build is priced by how many people work on it, and for how many months. Most of those people are not writing software. Here is where the money goes on a conventional build, and where it goes here.
| What you pay for | A conventional build | Here |
|---|---|---|
| The team | Six roles: a project manager, an analyst, an architect, developers, testers (QA) and someone to run the servers (DevOps). | One expert with a decade of domain experience, directing a team of AI agents and reading every change. |
| Management | A quarter of the person-months (people times months) go on coordinating rather than building. | No management layers and no hand-offs. One person directs, reviews and decides. |
| Calendar | Four months, much of it waiting for a decision, a hand-off or a test cycle. | AI agents write in parallel, so one month holds what used to take four. |
| Idle time | A waiting day is billed at the same rate as a building day. | No idle days billed. One fixed price, not time. |
| Testing | A separate testing team at the end, testing mostly by hand. | Automated tests written with the code and run on every change. Our own booking product carries 1,685 of them. |
| Security and hosting | An outside security test and hosting set-up, added on. | A security review and hosting are part of the month. |
The saving is not a discount. It is the cost of not paying for the waiting.
The meter
Our side follows the size of the job: about $833 for each person-month (one person for one month) of the conventional build, and never less than $3,000. Draft figures for this illustration, not a quote. Rupees are worked out at ₹95 to the dollar.
Show the worked example
A conventional build
At its starting size, the meter describes a mid-sized business application: a web console, a database, two or three connections to other systems, user roles, reports. As it is set now, a large IT services firm builds it with a team that averages 6 people over four months: an analyst and an architect from the start, developers once the design is settled, and testers for the second half.
| Role | People | Months | Rate an hour | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Project manager | 0.5 | 4 | $40 | $12,800 |
| Business analyst | 1 | 2 | $30 | $9,600 |
| Solution architect | 0.5 | 3 | $45 | $10,800 |
| Developers | 4 | 3 | $30 | $57,600 |
| QA engineers | 2 | 2.5 | $20 | $16,000 |
| DevOps engineer | 0.5 | 3 | $35 | $8,400 |
| The team | 6 on average | 4 | $30 average | $115,200 |
| Outside security test | $10,000 | |||
| Hosting set-up and three months | $6,000 | |||
| A conventional build, over four months | $131,200 | |||
A month of one person is billed as 160 hours, 3,840 hours in all. About a quarter of the team's time goes on coordinating rather than building, and a day spent waiting for a decision, a hand-off or a test cycle is billed like a building day.
The same application here
One expert for one month, directing the agents, reading every change, running the acceptance test with you.
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| One expert, one month | inside the fixed price |
| AI agent computing: code, tests, review, agents playing your users | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Automated testing, written with the code | inside the month |
| Security review | inside the month |
| Hosting, first 6 months (a small cloud server; our booking product runs on 6 vCPU and 6 GB) | $300 to $900 |
| Fixed price for this build: a set-up payment at sign-off, the rest after your acceptance test | about $20,000 |
- Developers $57,600
- The rest of the team $57,600
- Security test and hosting, bought outside $16,000
- Here, everything about $20,000
About a seventh, on these assumptions.
What does not shrink
- Your team's time: a few hours in the first three days, and a few days at the end of the month for your acceptance test.
- Third-party fees once the system is live, passed on at cost: AI models (LLMs), voice models, SMS and WhatsApp charges, and third-party licences.
- Moving data from an old system, where the old data is the problem. We scope it during the 3-day prototype and price it separately if it is large.
- The price rises with complexity; the model does not change. A larger system is still a fixed price, with a set-up payment at sign-off and the rest paid after your acceptance test passes.
Next step
Start with a 30-minute call
You describe the system; we say whether it is a fit and what the three-day prototype will show. The prototype fixes the price. You make a small set-up payment at sign-off and pay the rest after it passes your acceptance test.