Software development cost calculator
Understand the build cost and the cost to keep it running.
Feature-by-feature development effort
Adjusted development hours and costs. Design, planning, testing, and launch are separate phases above.
| Scope item | Hours | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Web application foundation | 180 | $13,500 |
| User accounts | 80 | $6,000 |
| Admin dashboard | 100 | $7,500 |
| Total development | 360 | $27,000 |
The numbers behind your estimate
This is a transparent planning model with editable rates, not an AI prediction or an industry price benchmark. Validate the scope and effort with your delivery team before treating it as a budget commitment.
1. Scope into development hours
Foundations: website 80h, web app 180h, internal software 180h, e-commerce 220h, SaaS 240h, mobile 260h. Five pages or screens are included; each additional one adds 8h. Add selected feature hours, plus integrations, migration, security, custom work, and 40h of production hardening for a production release.
2. Complexity and platform
Simple ×0.8, standard ×1, advanced ×1.5. For mobile foundations, screens, and features: one platform ×0.85, shared iOS/Android ×1, separate native apps ×1.6. Backend additions are counted once. Each development line is rounded up to whole hours. Basic accounts support permissions; payment setup supports subscriptions, and each is counted once.
3. Complete delivery budget
Planning adds 15% of development effort. Design adds 12%, 20%, or 30%. Testing adds 20% for MVPs or 30% for production. Launch adds 16h or 32h. Each phase is rounded up and multiplied by its hourly rate. Add your contingency; the displayed range is 85–125% of that total. It is an illustrative spread, not a statistical confidence interval.
4. Schedule and ownership costs
The timeline divides total effort by team size and productive weekly hours, rounds up, and adds a 25% upper allowance, with a two-week minimum. It assumes suitable skills and parallel work. Dependencies and approvals can extend delivery. Annual maintenance is a percentage of the subtotal; first-year ownership adds it and 12 months of your infrastructure and service inputs to the build budget.
Scope limits: Foundations include setup and basic architecture, not every feature of that product type. E-commerce includes catalog, cart, and checkout screens; payment-provider work is selected separately. The AI option covers a basic hosted-model assistant, not model training or a full retrieval system. Taxes, legal advice, certification, third-party usage not entered above, content, translation, and ongoing feature expansion are excluded.