Cost & scope · 8 min read

How much does bespoke software cost in the UK?

Published 23 October 2026 · By Sam Fourie, Niddo

In the UK in 2026, agencies typically publish £15,000 to £60,000 for a bespoke MVP, £30,000 to £80,000 for a production web application, and £100,000 or more for complex platforms. Senior contract developers charge a median of about £550 a day, £650 in London, and agencies £80 to £150 an hour. A senior studio abroad usually comes in below those figures for the same scope: ours are £12,000 to £32,000 for an MVP and £32,000 to £95,000 for a full platform, as one fixed price. Within any market, scope, user types, integrations and compliance move the number more than anything else.

What UK developers and agencies charge

Who	Typical rate	What you are buying
Senior contract developer, UK	About £550 a day (median); most between £400 and £900	One engineer's time; you supply the product management, design and testing
Senior contract developer, London	About £650 a day (median)	As above, at London rates
UK agency	£80 to £150 an hour; senior developers £550 to £750 a day	A team and a project manager, usually billed by time
Offshore agency	Advertised from around £40 an hour	Capacity at a low rate; quality, seniority and overlap vary widely
Product studio	One fixed price for an agreed scope	Design, engineering and launch by one team, accountable for the outcome

Contractor figures are medians from IT Jobs Watch for the six months to October 2026. Agency figures come from rate guides UK agencies published in 2026, so treat them as what agencies say rather than what every agency charges.

What UK agencies publish for typical builds

What you are building	Typical published UK range
MVP or first version	£15,000 to £30,000 basic; £30,000 to £60,000 for most funded startups; £60,000 and up when complex
Production web application or SaaS	£30,000 to £80,000 at medium complexity
Complex or regulated platform	From £100,000 into the hundreds of thousands

The ranges are wide because the words are loose. One supplier's MVP is a clickable prototype; another's has payments, an admin area and automated tests. The only useful comparison is between written scopes that say what is out as well as what is in.

What we charge

Stage	Typical scope	Price (GBP)	Timeline
Prototype	Designed screens, clickable, no real backend	£2,400 to £6,500	1 to 2 weeks
MVP	One core workflow, one user type, accounts, payments, a simple admin	£12,000 to £32,000	4 to 8 weeks
Full platform	Multiple roles, multi-tenancy, integrations, reporting, notifications, tests	£32,000 to £95,000	3 to 5 months
Regulated build	All of the above plus encryption, audit trails, compliance tooling and an external penetration test	£95,000 and up	4 to 6 months

For an MVP, our range sits below the typical UK agency range at both ends. For larger platforms the published UK ranges are too loosely defined to compare honestly, so ask us, and anyone else, for a written scope and one figure against it.

What actually drives the price

Workflows, not screens. A booking flow with confirmation emails is one workflow; add refunds, rescheduling and partner payouts and it is four.
User types. Every role (customer, staff, admin, partner) brings its own permissions, screens and testing.
Integrations. Accounting (Xero, Sage, QuickBooks), payments (Stripe, GoCardless), Open Banking, identity checks and CRMs each add discovery, error handling and monitoring. Thinly documented partners cost the most.
Data and compliance. UK GDPR applies to almost every product; regulated sectors add their own requirements, such as the FCA's for financial services or the NHS Data Security and Protection Toolkit for health.
Design depth. A product customers pay for needs a designed interface. An internal tool can be plainer, but it still has to be fast for the people who live in it.
Certainty. A fixed price includes the risk of being wrong about scope. Time and materials moves that risk to you, and nobody is paid to say no.

The costs that are not the build

VAT. UK agencies add 20 percent. A supplier outside the UK adds nothing, and you account for the VAT yourself under the reverse charge; a fully taxable business reclaims it on the same return, but a partly exempt one (in finance, insurance or health, say) may not recover all of it.
Hosting in a UK region: usually £25 to £250 a month at MVP scale for an app on Vercel or AWS London with a managed database, rising with traffic and data.
Usage-based services: payment fees, email and SMS delivery, file storage and identity checks, each pennies per use until you have a lot of users.
A penetration test before launch if you hold sensitive data: CREST-accredited UK firms commonly quote £2,500 to £8,000 for a typical web application.
Cyber Essentials, if your customers ask for it: £320 plus VAT a year for an organisation with up to nine staff (IASME). Central government and NHS buyers require it where a supplier will handle personal data or government systems.
The data protection fee to the Information Commission: £52 a year for most small organisations, £78 for medium-sized ones and £3,763 for the largest.
Running it after launch: monitoring, updates and small improvements, typically ten to twenty percent of the build cost a year. See what happens after launch.
R&D tax relief, if you were counting on it: work done overseas generally stopped qualifying in April 2024, so compare quotes net of any relief you would have claimed on a UK team. See outsourcing from the UK.

How to spend less without a worse product

Fund an MVP, not a platform. One workflow, one user type and one measure of success will prove most ideas for a fraction of the full price, and the rest can be earned.
Buy the commodity layer. Authentication, payments, email and hosting are solved problems; pay a vendor a few pounds a month instead of paying anyone to rebuild them.
Get a written scope that says what is out. It is the cheapest page of the project and the one that stops most arguments.
Design before code. Screens are cheap to change and production code is not.
Pay in milestones you accept on a staging environment, so nothing is invisible for months.
Own everything from day one: repositories, cloud accounts and domains in your name, so leaving costs nothing.

What a good quote includes

A written scope with what is in and what is out; one figure, or a fixed figure per phase; milestones tied to deliverables rather than dates; design before engineering; automated tests on the paths that matter; documentation; monitoring in production; a short warranty; and the code and accounts in your name. A quote that is a day rate and a hopeful number of weeks is an estimate, not a price.

How Niddo prices for UK companies

We scope with you first, then quote one fixed figure in pounds, with a deposit and milestones you accept on staging. No VAT is added to our invoices. We work in your hours from Johannesburg, one to two hours ahead of London, and hand over code, repositories and accounts in your name. See how we work with UK companies, or tell us what you are building.

Questions