How custom software is quoted — the logic of a 150+-delivery team
Direct answer: a custom software quote = estimated hours across discovery, design, development, testing, deployment and first-year maintenance, multiplied by the day rate. Price differences come mainly from scope and integration complexity — not from "writing code".
The six components of a quote
- Discovery: turning spoken ideas into a developable requirements list — the most underestimated step, and the one that decides success;
- Design: page and interaction design;
- Development: front-end, back-end and API implementation;
- Testing: functional, compatibility and load testing;
- Deployment: servers, domains, certificates and data initialization;
- First-year maintenance: bug fixes and small adjustments; usually billed separately from year two.
The five variables that move the price
Feature count, integrations with existing systems, performance and concurrency requirements, compliance requirements, and expected revision frequency. The same sentence — "build us a management system" — can produce quotes an order of magnitude apart.
Typical industry ranges (for reference)
- Marketing websites: tens of thousands to about 150,000 RMB;
- Department-level management systems: hundreds of thousands RMB;
- Multi-role platform systems: from the million-RMB level.
Three signals a quote is trustworthy
- It maps line by line to a requirements list, not one bundled lump sum;
- It accepts milestone-based payment (signing, design sign-off, launch, acceptance);
- Ownership of source code and infrastructure is written into the contract.
Bottom line: founded in Beijing in 2016, we have delivered 150+ projects. Our standing advice: lock the requirements list first, then talk price — reversed, a quote is just a guess.