Most briefs we receive in London are priced on build effort alone. The build is rarely what hurts. The three costs that decide whether a custom system pays for itself arrive after the first release, and they are all avoidable if you plan for them in week one.
1. The cost of the systems you already run
Custom software almost never lands in an empty room. It has to speak to a practice management system, a finance ledger, a rota, an identity provider. On a patient pathway we rolled across eleven clinic sites, the integration and cutover work was a larger share of the programme than the application itself, because every site had a slightly different local habit. Ask any London studio to price integration and migration as named lines, not as a percentage buried in a total.
2. The cost of the people who have to use it
A system that a team quietly works around has cost you twice. When we rebuilt a university certification track, the completion rate moved because the sequence matched how learners actually studied, not because the technology was newer. Budget for research and for the second pass after real use. It is cheaper than a rebuild and far cheaper than a system nobody adopts.
3. The cost of proving it works
- —Evidence: audit trails and exports you can hand to a regulator or an auditor without a fortnight of screenshots.
- —Operations: backups you have actually restored from, alerting on the transactions that earn money, patching on a schedule.
- —Ownership: your code in your repository, your data in your account, documented well enough that another team could take it on.
If the contract does not say who owns the code and the data, that is the most expensive line in it.
When custom is the wrong answer
We tell London clients to buy off the shelf whenever the process is genuinely standard. Custom development earns its keep when the process is your competitive advantage, when compliance forces a shape no vendor supports, or when you are paying per seat for software that fits nobody. If none of those is true, we will say so in the first conversation.
What to ask before you sign
- —Who, by name, writes the code, and will they still be on it in month six?
- —What is in the first release, and what does it prove?
- —How is integration and data migration priced separately?
- —What happens on day one after handover: who deploys, who is on call, who holds the keys?
We run custom software development from the Mayfair studio and work on site with teams across London. If you have a brief, send it and we will tell you honestly whether it needs building.