Affordable software development from $15,000.
A scoped production release in six weeks, priced fixed after the audit week. What a cheap software development company can honestly deliver at this number, what it cannot, and the projects where $15,000 is the wrong budget.
What $15,000 of software development actually buys
One surface, built properly and released. An internal tool, a customer portal, a booking or claims workflow, an integration between two systems that currently talk through a spreadsheet, or the first slice of a larger product. Designed, built, tested where it matters, deployed into your own infrastructure and documented well enough that someone else can change it.
It is not an app store launch, a platform, or a rewrite of anything. The scope that fits $15,000 is roughly what two senior people can design and ship in six weeks without cutting the parts that make software survive contact with users. That is a real constraint and it is the honest boundary of the tier.
Below this number sits the audit at $5,000: two weeks that produce a specification, an architecture, a risk list and a fixed quote. If your idea is still a paragraph, that is the correct purchase, and the plan is yours to take to any other firm.
Above it, most projects land between $15K to $80K. We publish the floor so you can decide whether to call.
What you get at this price
- A week of audit and design: the spec, the screens, the architecture, the risks
- Four weeks of build with a weekly demo running in your stack, not in slides
- A senior engineer and a designer who has shipped interfaces since 2016
- Tests around the parts that would be expensive to get wrong
- Deployment into your own cloud account, with the pipeline written down
- Error tracking and logging configured before launch, not after the first incident
- Documentation, a walkthrough and 30 days of support
- Full ownership of code, infrastructure and pipeline, with no licence attached
The weekly demo is the mechanism that makes a fixed price safe for you. You see the real thing every week, so if it is going the wrong way you find out in week two, when correcting it costs a conversation.
Design is included rather than optional. We started as a frontend company in 2016 and the same people do both, which is the only reason it fits inside the number.
What you do not get at this price
The exclusions are what make a fixed price possible. Read them as the terms of the deal rather than as things being withheld.
- No 24/7 support, no on-call rota and no uptime SLA. Business hours, 30 days, then a retainer if you want one.
- No unlimited revisions. Scope freezes after the audit week and changes are quoted.
- No dedicated project manager. Two senior people who talk to you directly.
- No bespoke model training. If the build needs AI, it uses hosted models with evaluation, not a fine-tune.
- No compliance certification. We build to your controls; we do not get you certified.
- No native iOS and Android apps. One web surface, responsive. Native is a separate build.
- No load testing for scale you do not have yet, and no multi-region architecture.
- No brand identity, marketing site or content. Software only.
The revision limit is the one that surprises people, so it is worth being precise. You get as many rounds as the design phase needs, because that is the cheap place to change your mind. Once build starts, changes to what was agreed are quoted. That is not a penalty; it is why the number on the plan is the number on the invoice.
If any of these exclusions is actually a requirement, the honest answer is a bigger budget rather than a cleverer contract. We will say so on the first call, and we will tell you roughly what it should cost even if we are not the firm to build it.
What the alternatives cost
Ranges are the 2026 market rates we quote against, not published prices from named firms.
The offshore row is worth reading twice, because the arithmetic is closer than the rate suggests. At $25 an hour a 600-hour quote is $15,000 before a single change request, and hourly billing moves the risk of an incomplete specification onto you.
Software development pricing by scope
Every band is fixed after the audit week, and every one includes design. The jump from a scoped build to an AI product MVP is not mostly model work: it is evaluation, failure handling and the interface that lets people trust an answer, which is where the weeks go.
If your budget sits between two bands, shrink the scope rather than stretch the money. A smaller thing released beats a larger thing at eighty per cent.
How we keep it this price
Senior only, and two of them. No juniors learning on your build, no project manager translating between you and them, no delivery lead writing a status report about the translation. The person who quotes the work is the person who writes it.
No discovery theatre. One audit week produces a spec and a fixed quote. Agencies at five times this price run a discovery phase that produces a document, then bill the build separately. We compress it because after a decade the questions are known.
A starter kit we already own. Authentication, roles, CI, deployment, logging, error tracking and a component library are written, tested and reused across projects. You are not funding a login screen for the ninetieth time. What is bespoke is your domain, and that is where the six weeks go.
Fixed scope after the audit week. Change control is administratively expensive. Freezing scope once, in writing, removes a category of cost that clients usually pay for without seeing it on an invoice.
Your infrastructure, not ours. We deploy into your cloud account. There is no platform for us to maintain, no hosting margin, and nothing you have to keep paying us for after handover.
What fixed scope means, and where it bites
After the audit week you get a plan that lists what will exist at the end and what will not. The price does not move after that. Neither does the scope, and the second half of that sentence is the part that stings.
In week four you will have a good idea. Fixed scope means the answer is either no or a quote, and both feel worse than a supplier who says yes. The alternative is the arrangement where every yes is free until the invoice arrives.
Roughly ten per cent of the estimate is held back for things that turn out wrong rather than new: a screen that fails in practice, a rule the audit misread.
- The plan states what is in and what is out, in writing, before build starts
- Underestimated effort is our cost, not yours
- Genuinely new scope is quoted, never absorbed silently
- About 10% of the estimate is reserved for corrections, not additions
- You can stop after the audit week and take the plan to another firm
When you should spend more than this
Six projects where a low cost build is the wrong purchase. We turn these down at this price rather than take them and hope.
Money or safety is on the line
Payments, medical decisions, anything where one bug becomes a headline. The testing and review that prevent it are not a $15,000 line item.
Compliance is required on day one
SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI. The controls, the evidence and the audit cost more than the software they wrap, and skipping them is not a saving.
The specification does not exist
If nobody can say what it does in a paragraph, buy the $5,000 audit and stop there. A fixed price on an undefined build is fiction.
It must run at scale immediately
High concurrency, real-time guarantees, large data. Those are architecture problems, and architecture is bought before the first release, not after.
You need a team, not a build
A product that changes weekly needs people who stay. Hire, or take a longer engagement. A six-week build handed over is the wrong shape.
You are migrating a legacy system
The unknowns in twelve years of data are the project. Anyone quoting a migration cheaply has not looked at the data yet.
The two things you should never cut
When a budget is tight, cut admin screens, design polish beyond the main path, analytics, and handling for edge cases you have never seen. Two others get cut just as often and should not be.
Tests around the expensive path. Not full coverage, which is a luxury at this price. Tests around the specific places where being wrong costs money or trust: the calculation, the permission check, the thing that sends an email to a customer.
Handover and deployment. Documentation and a written deployment pipeline decide whether the next developer can change this in an afternoon or has to rebuild it. They are the cheapest insurance in the project, and the first thing a rushed quote drops, because you cannot see them missing until you need them.
Six weeks, week by week
Scoping call
Thirty minutes. Fit, approach, and a range you can plan around.
Audit and fixed quote
Spec, screens, architecture, risks. The price stops moving here.
Build
Weekly demos of the real thing running in your own stack.
Harden and hand over
Deployment, documentation, a walkthrough, 30 days of support.
Builds we have shipped
These ran above the floor tier, on longer timelines and larger budgets. The method is the one the $15,000 build uses: audit, weekly demos, fixed scope, handover.
Questions about affordable software development
In 2026 the market runs roughly $18 to $35 an hour offshore, $30 to $70 for a freelancer, $85 to $180 at a UK or US agency, and $110,000 to $150,000 a year fully loaded in house. We do not sell hours: a scoped build is $15,000 fixed after the audit week.
Not building it. The second cheapest is no-code: Bubble, Airtable or similar will get an internal tool live for a few hundred dollars a month plus a hundred hours of someone else. We recommend that route regularly. It stops being cheapest once you need real authentication, a data model you can trust, an audit trail, or performance under load.
On the hourly rate, always. On the delivered project, often not. A $25 an hour team quoting 600 hours is $15,000 before the first change request, and hourly billing puts the risk of a vague spec on you rather than the supplier. Without a precise spec and senior review on your side, the rate is not the price.
Not a production app. $5,000 buys the paid audit: two weeks with a senior engineer and a designer, ending in a specification, an architecture, a risk list and a fixed quote you can take to another firm. For a genuinely undefined idea it is the only responsible thing to sell.
Because most of the cost is not typing. It is deciding what the thing does, handling the cases nobody mentioned, making it survive real users, and leaving it in a state the next person can change. A cheap quote has usually priced the typing alone.
A week of audit and design, four weeks of build with weekly demos in your stack, a week of hardening and handover, deployment into your own infrastructure, tests around the expensive paths, documentation and 30 days of support. Two senior people, no project manager.
Fixed, after the audit week. Before the audit we can give a range but not a number, because a number before a spec is a guess with an invoice attached. Once scope is frozen the price does not move, and if we estimated the effort badly that is our problem rather than yours.
You do. Repository, infrastructure, deployment pipeline and documentation, handed over at the end. Eazetech keeps no access after the 30-day support window unless you ask. There is no licence, no hosting tie and nothing that stops working if you never speak to us again.
If we underestimated, we absorb it. If the scope changed, we quote it, because a firm that swallows scope changes at a fixed price either loses money or quietly cuts quality where you cannot see. About ten per cent of the estimate is reserved for things that turn out wrong rather than new.
Frequently, and the tell is what a quote leaves out. Ask any supplier what happens when the third-party API is down, who writes the deployment pipeline, and what is not in scope. A cheap quote that answers all three is a bargain. One that cannot is a deposit on a rewrite.
Want a fixed price on a small build?
Describe the thing in a paragraph. We will tell you on the call whether it fits $15,000, what to cut if it does not, and roughly what the audit would answer first.