Two figures decide whether this is worth doing: what it costs to build, and what it costs to keep running. Both are told to you before anything starts, and neither moves without your say-so.
Quoted from your sketches, before a line of code. You pay half to start and the rest as it is delivered. A first version is usually a few thousand pounds, against the £50,000 and upwards a development house quotes for the same brief.
Hosting, storage for every photo and record, nightly backups, monitoring around the clock, security updates, staff accounts, and fixes. That is the whole running cost. Larger teams move up a band, which is in the agreement from day one.
Optional: £100 a month for daily service access. Same working day response, work starting the same day on anything broken, and two small changes included every month.
Maintenance is simple. Once your app is running, any issue with the agreed function of the app is fixed on the house, within a day or two, and faster than that if it is urgent. A crash, a photo that will not upload, a login that fails, a wrong total: those are ours to put right, however long they take, and there is never a discussion about whether it counts.
A change is different. It is something that already works as agreed, but you want it different or you want something new. Those are priced like this.
Up to two hours. Wording, an extra field on a form, another column in the export, a new filter, changing who can see what.
Half a day to two days. A new screen, a new report, a change to how a job moves through its steps, a new notification.
Three days or more. A new part of the app, a new kind of user, a customer portal, a link to another system. These are gathered into a version rather than charged one at a time.
Day rate £450. Anything medium or larger is quoted with a fixed price and a delivery date before any work starts. Asking always costs nothing.
Businesses change, and an app that cannot change with them stops being used. So the bigger work is grouped into numbered versions rather than trickling out as separate invoices.
Requests are collected as they come up, from anyone on your team, and raising one is never charged for. When there is enough to be worth doing, we write down exactly what each one will do, and quote one fixed price with a delivery date. You say yes, no, or take items out. Half is payable when the version is agreed and half when it is live. Testing, training notes and the rollout to your phones are part of it, not an extra.
A new version typically runs at 20 to 30 per cent of the original build. Where we propose one ourselves, because we can see what would help, it is quoted the same way. You are never charged for an idea, only for building one you have said yes to.
If the app is down or data is at risk, work starts as soon as it is seen, aiming to fix it the same day. Monitoring usually tells us before you do. Something broken but workable is the next working day. Everything else, two to three working days. Working hours are Monday to Friday, 9 to 5.
Your records and photos are yours, not ours, and they are stored in the European Union. If we ever part company you can have a complete copy, free, and it is deleted afterwards.
No. Hosting runs in twelve month periods so the price is fixed for a year at a time, but you can stop whenever you like, with no notice period. If we ever needed to stop, you would get 90 days to move.
That is how it is built. One app, the phone version for the people out on jobs and a full screen version for the office, both looking at the same live information.
Fixed, free, as above. Nobody should pay to make the thing they commissioned work as agreed.
A sketch, a spreadsheet, a photograph of the sheet on your clipboard. That is enough to tell you what it would take, what it would cost, and how quickly your team could be using it.