What Drives the Price of Custom B2B Software

Q.Why Won't Anyone Tell You What Custom Software Costs?

This is genuinely frustrating for a buyer, and most vendors make it worse by refusing to explain the drivers at all. So here they are. If you know which ones apply to you, you can read two very different quotes for the same brief and understand why they differ — and you can shape your own project to land at the low end on purpose.

The Seven Things That Move the Number

1. How many kinds of user, and what each one can do

Not how many people — how many roles. A portal where customers place orders is one role. Add a sales rep who orders on behalf of a customer, an internal person who approves credit, a warehouse view, and an admin who sets pricing, and you have five, each with its own screens and its own rules about what it can see and change.

Roles are the most reliable predictor of size, and the easiest thing to trim. Most first versions need two.

2. How complicated your pricing is

This is the single biggest swing factor in wholesale, and it is almost always underestimated in the brief.

A flat price list is straightforward. Per-customer contract pricing is more work. Contract pricing with volume breaks, promotional periods, customer-group overrides and a rule about which wins when two apply — that is not a feature, it is a system, and it deserves its own conversation. Bring your actual pricing rules to the first call, including the exceptions your team handles manually, because those exceptions are the project.

3. What it has to talk to, and how well that system cooperates

An integration is not one thing. Writing an order into an accounting system with a documented, modern API is routine. Reading live stock out of a fifteen-year-old system with no API, via a nightly file drop, is a different project with different risks.

Ask your vendor to say, in the quote, exactly which systems are in scope, in which direction data flows, how often, and what happens when the other system is down. A quote that says "integrates with your ERP" without those four answers is not priced.

4. Units of measure and the physical reality of your product

Each, case, pallet. Split cases. Mixed cases. Catch weight, where the invoice quantity is not known until it is picked. Conversions that differ by customer. Lots, expiry dates and FEFO picking.

If two or three of these apply to you, they will touch every screen in the system and they belong at the top of the brief, not in a footnote.

5. Data migration, which is where timelines actually die

Getting your items, customers and open orders into the new system is usually the least glamorous and most underestimated line in the project.

The work is not the import. The work is discovering that the same product exists twice under different codes, that pack size lives inside the description field, and that six hundred customer records share four addresses. Someone has to decide what is true. That someone usually has to be you, and the number of rounds it takes is the thing to agree up front.

6. Who has to approve what, and what has to be provable later

A system where an order simply becomes an order is simpler than one where it waits for a credit check, a manager, or a quality release — and much simpler than one where you have to be able to prove, two years later, who approved it and when.

If you are in a regulated category, or if your customers audit you, say so in the first sentence of the brief. Retrofitting an audit trail costs several times what building it in does.

7. Where it runs, and who keeps it running

Hosting, backups, monitoring, and the person who answers when something breaks at 6am. This is a recurring cost, not a build cost, and it belongs in the comparison. A quote that ignores it is not cheaper — it is incomplete.

The Four Things That Quietly Double a Quote

What the Firms That Do Publish a Number Say

A handful of development firms publish ranges. They are worth reading together, because the spread tells you more than any single figure — and because the two ERP vendors a distributor is most likely to evaluate publish nothing at all.

Three things are worth taking from that table.

The Clutch numbers are not the same measure. "$10,000 to $49,000" is the bracket most reviewed projects fall into; "$132,480.29" is the arithmetic mean, pulled upward by large projects. Anyone quoting one at you as "the average" is telling you half of something. Clutch also reports that "the usual timeline for a software development project based on verified project reviews is about 13 months" — which is a useful reality check against anyone promising a platform in six weeks.

The published ranges are mostly for bigger companies than you. ScienceSoft's own sample estimates describe "Inventory software for a large enterprise" and an "ecommerce portal for the mid-market." If you are a $2M–$50M distributor, you are below the bottom of most of these pages, which is precisely why none of them fit and why the first version has to be cut down deliberately.

The two ERP vendors most likely to be on your shortlist publish no price at all. That is not a criticism — their pricing genuinely depends on modules and usage. But it is worth noticing that "we can't publish a number" is the industry norm at every price point, not a dodge invented by small firms.

Why Two Honest Quotes Can Differ by a Lot

If you get a much cheaper quote and a much more expensive one for the same brief, the difference is usually one of five things, and none of them is greed:

• One of them included the integration and the other assumed a CSV export. Ask both.
• One priced a first version and the other priced everything you described. Ask what is in version one.
• One included data migration and the other did not. Ask how many rounds.
• One is fixed price and the other is an estimate. These are not comparable numbers. An estimate is an opening position.
• One will use a team of six and the other a team of two. For a project this size, smaller is usually faster, because most of the cost of a big team is the team talking to itself.

The genuinely dangerous quote is not the expensive one. It is the very cheap one with no written scope, because the number is an entry price and the real conversation happens at month three, when you have no leverage left.

How to Land at the Low End on Purpose

You have more control over this than a vendor will usually tell you.

Cut it to one workflow that goes end to end. Orders in, order out, into your system. Not reporting, not analytics, not the customer-facing dashboard. Those are version two, and version two is much better informed.

Two roles, not five. Add the rest once people are using it.

Pick the integration with the best documentation, even if it is not the system you care most about, for the first version. You will learn more from one working integration than from three planned ones.

Clean your item file before you start. Independently, as its own small project. It shortens every other line in the quote and you benefit from it either way.

Bring the exceptions to the first call. The pricing exception, the customer who orders differently, the product that is measured strangely. These are what the price is made of, and finding them in week one is free. Finding them in week nine is not.

What Should Be in the Quote, Regardless of the Number

Whatever the figure, the document should contain: a written scope with an explicit exclusions list; a fixed price rather than an estimate; what happens when scope changes, priced and scheduled; a date by which something is live and usable; what data migration is included and how many rounds; what support costs after launch and what it covers; and a plain statement that you own the code, the accounts, the domain and your data.

A quote with all of that at a higher number is cheaper than a quote missing half of it at a lower one. The second number is not a price. It is a starting bid.

FAQ

Q: Why won't software companies publish a price for custom work? A: Because the same brief can describe a six-week project or a nine-month one, depending on the number of user roles, how complex your pricing rules are, what it must integrate with, how clean your data is, and whether approvals have to be provable later. It is also the industry norm at every price point — NetSuite and Acumatica publish no figure either. What a buyer should expect instead is a fixed price in writing after one call that covers those specifics.

Q: What is the average cost of a custom software project? A: Clutch, from its own verified project reviews (updated September 2026), reports that most projects fall in a $10,000–$49,000 bracket while the arithmetic mean is $132,480.29 — two different measures that are often quoted interchangeably. Published ranges from development firms sit higher: Itransition gives "$90,000 for an entry-level CRM for small businesses to $300,000+" for an enterprise one, and ScienceSoft gives "$50,000 to $1,000,000" for a medium or large application. Most of those pages describe companies considerably larger than a $2M–$50M distributor.

Q: What makes custom B2B software more expensive than expected? A: Four things, usually: features added after the scope was set, an integration with a system that has no documented API, item and customer data that has to be cleaned before anything can be tested, and no single person on the buyer's side empowered to make decisions. Each is avoidable, and all four are cheaper to handle before the project starts.

Q: How do I compare two very different quotes for the same project? A: Check five things: whether each includes the integration or assumes a file export, whether each prices a first version or everything you described, whether data migration is included and for how many rounds, whether the number is fixed or an estimate, and how large a team it assumes. An estimate and a fixed price are not comparable numbers.

Q: How can I reduce the cost of a custom software project? A: Cut version one to a single workflow that runs end to end, limit it to two user roles, start with the integration that has the best documentation, clean your item file as a separate small project beforehand, and bring your pricing and process exceptions to the very first call rather than letting them surface in week nine.

Related Reading

• What to Ask Before You Sign a Custom Software Quote
• Getting Repeat Orders Off the Phone: What a B2B Ordering Portal Actually Changes
• Why Custom CRMs Fail at Distributors — and the Four Rules That Prevent It