What software actually
costs in India.
Not a price list — a straight explanation of what decides the number, so you can check any quote you are given, including ours. Every variable below is something you can count in your own business this afternoon, before you speak to a single vendor.
Our commercial terms
What you get, and when
- The quote
- One fixed written figure in INR after discovery
- Billing
- No hourly billing, no meter running
- Payment
- Staged against working software you have seen running on your own data
- Running cost
- Quoted at the same time as the build, not a year later
- Scoping call
- Free, no obligation
the number nobody quotes upfront
Why there is no price list here.
You came here for a number, and it is only fair to explain why there is not one. It is not commercial coyness. A published band for “custom CRM” only looks precise because it silently assumes a screen count, a number of user roles and an integration list. If those assumptions do not match your business — and they usually do not — the figure is wrong in a direction you have no way of detecting until the real quote arrives.
You have probably already met the version of this that does real damage: a low starting price advertised prominently, followed after discovery by a number several times higher. Nobody technically lied. The starting price described a project nobody was ever going to build. We would rather not participate in that, and we would rather you were equipped to spot it.
So this page gives you the mechanism instead. Below are the five variables that move a software quote more than anything else, what routinely sits outside a build price, and the cases where the honest answer is that you should not commission software from us or anyone else. Take all of it to whichever vendor you are talking to. If they cannot answer the same questions about your project, that is the most useful thing this page can tell you.
What actually moves the number.
Variable 01
How many screens there are
Count the distinct views, not the features.
A screen is anywhere someone looks at or enters something different: a list, a detail view, a form, a report, a dashboard. Fifteen screens and fifty screens are not the same project even when the feature list on the proposal reads identically, because every screen carries its own layout, validation, empty state, error state and mobile behaviour.
This is the single best sanity check on a quote you have been given. Ask the vendor how many screens they have counted. If they cannot say, they have not scoped it and the number they gave you is a guess that will be revised later.
Variable 02
How many kinds of user
Roles multiply work faster than features do.
One role — everybody logs in and sees everything — is a fundamentally cheaper system than four roles with different permissions. Each additional role means decisions about what that person may see, may edit, may approve and may export, and every one of those decisions has to be enforced on the server rather than merely hidden in the interface.
A school with an accountant, a class teacher, a principal and a parent portal is a four-role system. A warehouse where three people share one login is a one-role system. That difference is usually larger than any individual feature on the list.
Variable 03
What it has to talk to
Every integration is somebody else’s rules.
Payment gateways, WhatsApp Business, SMS, accounting software, biometric attendance, an existing ERP: each one is a separate approval process, a separate set of credentials, a separate failure mode and a separate thing that changes without warning. Integrations are where fixed-price software projects most often go wrong, because the work is not in the writing — it is in the waiting and the retry logic.
It is also where you can most easily save money. Ask honestly whether an integration is needed on day one or whether an export file would do for the first six months. Very often it would.
Variable 04
What data has to come with you
Migration is a project, not a step.
Moving three years of student records, stock ledgers or customer history out of spreadsheets and into a new system is real work, and it is almost always underestimated because it looks like copying. It is not copying. It is deciding what every inconsistent old value was meant to say, agreeing the canonical version with you, moving it and then checking it.
We have paid for this lesson ourselves. On one catalogue build, two fields started as free text and turning them into structured fields later cost a migration we could have avoided by asking one more question during discovery — that is written up in full on the tools.narvyn.com record.
Variable 05
How much of the workflow you want covered
The last twenty per cent is not twenty per cent of the cost.
Software that handles the normal case is a fraction of the cost of software that handles every case. The transfer that was reversed, the fee paid half in cash, the order dispatched from the second godown, the patient who is also staff — each exception is a branch someone has to design, build and test.
This is the variable you have the most control over. Deciding that three genuine edge cases will be handled on paper for the first year is often the difference between a project that happens and a project that stays a proposal. We would rather have that conversation at the quoting stage than watch a budget disappear into cases that occur twice a month.
What a build cost does not include.
Hosting and domain
Ongoing, paid to the provider, not to us. Small for a website, larger for a system holding years of records and daily backups. We quote the expected annual figure alongside the build rather than a year later.
Third-party usage fees
Payment gateway percentages, WhatsApp Business conversation charges, SMS credits, mapping and email services. These are metered by the provider and scale with your volume, so no vendor can honestly fold them into a fixed build price.
Content and data entry
Photography, copywriting, and typing a catalogue or a student roll out of a PDF. It can be your work or ours, but it is real hours either way and it belongs on the quote where you can see it.
Support after handover
Bug fixes inside the agreed period are ours. Changes, new modules and ongoing maintenance are a separate arrangement, quoted at the same time as the build so there is no surprise in month thirteen.
None of these are hidden charges — they are simply not ours to charge. The reason to list them is that a quote which appears cheaper than another often differs only in which of these four it has quietly left off the page.
Three times custom software is the wrong purchase.
When an off-the-shelf tool already fits. If your billing is straightforward, Vyapar or myBillBook will do it for a subscription that costs less than a scoping call. If you need a simple website and nothing else, a website builder is a rational choice. Paying for a custom build to replicate something that already exists is the most common way Indian SMBs waste money on software, and vendors rarely say so because the fee is theirs either way.
When the process itself is the problem. Software is very good at making an existing process faster and completely unable to fix one that does not work. A system will send fee reminders reliably; it will not fix a due date set three days before most parents are paid. If the process is broken, fix the process first — it is free, and you may find you no longer need the software.
When nobody internally owns it. Every system we have seen succeed had one person inside the business who wanted it to exist and would answer questions during the build. Every one that struggled did not. If nobody has time to be that person for the next several weeks, the honest advice is to wait until somebody does, however inconvenient that is for us to say.
The scoping call is free precisely so this conversation can happen before any money moves. We would rather tell you on a call that you do not need us than take a fee for a system that gets abandoned in month four — the second outcome costs us more in the long run than the first.
Asked before every quote.
How much does custom software development cost in India?
Wide enough that any single figure quoted without seeing your requirements is marketing rather than information. A three-screen internal tool with one user role and no integrations, and a multi-role system with payments and data migration, are both truthfully called “custom software” and can differ by more than an order of magnitude.
What is genuinely useful before you talk to anyone is to count the five things above: your screens, your roles, your integrations, your data migration and how many exceptions you want covered. Those five answers move a quote far more than the vendor's choice of technology, and they are the same five questions any competent vendor will ask you.
Why do you not publish a price list?
Because a published band would be either useless or misleading. To make one look precise we would have to assume a screen count, a role count and an integration list — and if those assumptions do not match your business, the number is wrong in a way you cannot see. Vendors who publish a low starting figure and then quote three times it after discovery are not being transparent; they are advertising.
What we do instead is on this page: explain exactly how the number is arrived at, so you can sanity-check any quote you receive, including ours. Then, after a scoping call, you get one fixed written figure in INR covering an agreed scope — no hourly billing and no line items appearing at the end that nobody mentioned at the beginning.
How much does it cost to create a business website in Gurugram?
Less than a system, and driven by different things: how many distinct page templates there are, whether photography and copy already exist, how large the catalogue is, and whether staff need to edit content themselves afterwards. A five-page company site with supplied copy is a small job. A catalogue site with 120 technical entries that someone has to type out of a printed brochure is not, and the difference is data preparation rather than design.
Two real reference points from our case records: a manufacturer's catalogue site with about 120 entries took seven weeks, and an industrial catalogue with 180-plus SKUs took four. The second was larger and faster because its specification data was already clean.
Do you charge by the hour?
No. One fixed written quote after discovery, covering exactly the scope agreed, with payment staged against working software you have seen running on your own data rather than against dates in a calendar. The annual running cost is quoted at the same time as the build cost — that is the number most vendors leave until year two.
What does a scoping call actually involve?
A conversation about what breaks in your week, then the five questions above applied to your business. You leave with a clear scope and an honest view of whether this is worth building at all; we follow up with a written quote in INR. It costs nothing and there is no obligation attached to it. If the honest answer is that an off-the-shelf tool serves you better, we will say so on the call rather than after you have paid.
Where the money goes
Bring us a quote and we will
read it with you.
Whether it is ours or somebody else's. Tell us what you are trying to build and we will scope it honestly — the call is free and a written INR figure follows it.
no obligation · a written quote follows the call