Nobody will give you a number. You ask what a platform costs and you get "it depends on scope, let's have a call" - which is true, and is also the answer of someone who does not want to be held to anything.
It does depend. The ranges are still not a secret, and you cannot plan without them.
The three bands
These are what I charge, in Romania, for work I do end to end. They are not industry averages and an agency with twelve people will quote differently - they have twelve salaries to cover and I have one.
- €1,000 - €15,000. A site, or one internal tool with a clear edge. A booking page, a catalogue, a form that feeds a spreadsheet, a calculator. One kind of user, one main flow.
- €5,000 - €40,000. A platform a business actually runs on. Several roles with different permissions, real workflows, money moving through it, integrations with things you do not control. This is most of what I build.
- Above that. Not one system but several sharing a login: a marketplace with two sides, a product sold to other companies, anything where "the platform" is really four products in a trench coat.
The bands overlap on purpose. A simple platform genuinely can cost less than an elaborate site, and anyone whose price list is a clean staircase is describing their pricing rather than your problem.
What actually moves the number
Rarely the thing clients expect. Screens are cheap; it is what happens behind them that costs.
- Integrations you do not control. Every external service is somebody else's API, somebody else's documentation and somebody else's outage. Two is fine. Nine is a different project, and the ninth costs more than the first because they interact.
- Roles and permissions. "Staff can see it" is one line. "Staff can see their own location's records, managers see the region, and finance sees everything but cannot edit clinical notes" is a data model decision that touches every query in the system.
- Money and legal obligations. Payments, invoicing, fiscal documents and consent records are all places where being approximately right is the same as being wrong, so they take the time that being exactly right takes.
- How fast you decide. The genuinely uncomfortable one. A build waiting three weeks for an answer about how discounts work costs more than one that waited three days, and no amount of engineering fixes it.
Why the first number is usually wrong
Not because anyone is lying. Because at the first conversation neither of us knows what the thing is yet.
You know the problem. You do not yet know that your five "customer types" are really two with a flag, that the report you asked for casually needs data nobody has been recording, or that the invoicing rule you described in one sentence has four exceptions your accountant has been handling by hand for years. None of that is anyone's fault. It is what the discovery is for.
A number given before that is a guess, and we would both spend month three renegotiating it - which is worse than a slower start, because by then the work is half done and neither of us can walk away cleanly.
What I do instead
A short paid discovery: one to two weeks, fixed price, fixed length. It ends with a written scope, a data model, an architecture and a staged plan with real costs against each stage.
The document is yours whether or not you continue with me. That is not generosity - it is the only arrangement under which you can trust the number, because I have no incentive to inflate a scope you can take to somebody else.
It also occasionally ends with me telling you the answer is a €40/month subscription and a well-designed form, which has happened and will happen again. There is a whole note about when not to build, because it comes up often enough to be worth writing down.
Questions worth asking whoever you hire
Not just me. These separate a considered quote from an optimistic one:
- What is not included at this price?
- What happens to the price if I change my mind in month two - is there a process, or does it get absorbed silently and resented later?
- What do I own at the end, and when do I get it? (The right answer is "everything, from day one" - see what happens when a developer disappears.)
- What are you assuming that I have not confirmed?
The last one is the most useful question in software procurement, and almost nobody asks it.