How much does custom software development cost?
As your business becomes larger and larger, you ultimately come to the idea of how to build custom financial software that will ease your business processes.
Here you have two ways out. The first one means to buy access to ready-made software that will take about $20 to $7000 per month. The second way means creating a personal system. To build custom software, you need to pay great attention to nuisances that influence the price.
Why do you need custom software?
Advantages of software custom:
- Adaptations according to the needs of your business;
- Includes only the necessary functions;
- Full integration based on your requirements;
- No compatibility problems;
- easy to expand the system;
- The database is under full control;
- Nobody can influence your system but you.
The only minus of custom software is the cost. It can range from $50,000 to several million. If your business is developing rapidly, do not spare money for software development. Soon, this payment will pay for itself.
So, how much does the custom software cost?
3 main modules of software development cost
There are several modules included in the system that influence the final cost of the program. The most essential of them are the sales, marketing, and support service.
Sales module
This module includes different tools for managing sales processes. With them, you can easily analyze market dynamics and trends, develop plans on sales, and so on. Thus, you can automate a significant part of your work with your customers, database, and planning.
Option | Features | Requirements | Sections | Cost | Time |
Account management | Dealing with data about customers that stick or might stick to your business | Strong links of data tables set between sections; Ability to range information according to set parameters | The instrument panel, accounts, tasks, opportunities, contacts, etc | $30,000 – $40,000 | 3 months |
Analytics | Configuring dashboards and charting for studying and visualizing sales trends | Ability to take information from external sites, and so on | Sales analytics | $5,000 – $10,000 | 2 months |
Planning | Forecasting sales | Presence of information about marketing, sales history, and analytics | Sales planning and forecasting | $5,000 – $15,000 | 2 months |
Marketing module
This module automates the control, management, and tracking of the marketing campaigns’ results. It will allow you to plan and build marketing strategies following the received data.
Option | Features | Requirements | Sections | Cost | Time |
Marketing campaign development | Creating marketing events and tasks; Handling financial issues and assigning responsibility for certain events | Ability to attach the tasks, marketing materials, invoices, tables, reports; Communication among the staff | Marketing campaign development | $8,000 – $15,000 | 4 months |
Customer analysis | Segmenting customers according to their profitability | Information about customers | Customer division | $5,000 – $10,000 | 2 months |
Development strategy | Inventing a new direction of your business movement | Information about successful and not successful campaigns | Marketing analytics | $5,000 – $10,000 | 3 months |
Support module
Consider you have the most successful company if you have a high-quality and reliable support module. Customers should understand that you care about them a lot and do not entrust them to robots. To deal with this problem, you can hire a group of people that will be responsible for communication with clients. They will easily get all the important information for you.
Option | Features | Requirements | Sections | Cost | Time |
Support service | Distributing requests to the support team among the staff and showing them information about the client | Ability to set priorities, tasks, and limits | Help desk and agency console | $20,000 – $30,000 | 2 months |
Knowledge base | A set of various questions that customers may have. Also, it includes answers to each of the questions | Ability to work with texts | Database of answers to questions, instructions | $5,000 – $6,000 | 1 month |
Service analysis | Gathering statistics about client requests, which registers issues and tracks their solving | Access to all of the sources of feedback
| Statistics on working with clients | $8,000 – $10,000 | 2 months |
Additional expenses on the budget building software
The final cost of personal software does not include only the software development cost. It also contains the project preparation, staff training, technical support, and program improvement.
Pre-project development
Goal | Tasks | Cost | Time |
Prepare the project | Structure development, database creating, clarification of requirements, etc | $100 – $1,0000 | 1 – 2 weeks |
Here you need to state your goal and general requirements for your future program. Make them brief and precise for the software developer to understand you at once.
Staff training
Goal | Tasks | Cost | Time |
Make the staff understand how the system works. | Hire an administrator and arrange the help from the developer | Depends on the project difficulty and the number of your employees | During the first time after the launch or constantly |
Each of your employees should have a full understanding of the software system principles. They should easily navigate it and cope with any tasks you give them. To do this, you need to teach them. Think over programs for training the team, prepare manuals for studying. This will significantly reduce the time spent on familiarization with the new program.
Technical support
Goal | Tasks | Cost | Time |
Ensure normal operation of CRM system | Hire an administrator and arrange the help from the developer | Depends on the project difficulty and the number of your employees | During the first time after the launch or constantly |
After you launch a finished program, you may find some discrepancies or mistakes hidden in the system. To eliminate them, you need to hire a specialist that knows well how to work with CRM websites.
Here are the main variants of technical support you can choose from.
- Call out — you call out a specialist to fix a bug.
- For a certain time — you choose a specialist that will support your system fixing bugs every day.
- Managed services — you ask for help from a special company that provides you a range of services.
- Crowdsourcing — you unite your employees to discuss problems and bugs they have.