What we charge, and why

Most studio websites do not publish prices. We understand why — every project is different, quoting blind is dangerous, and a number without context invites the wrong comparison.

The problem is that this leaves the buyer with no way to sanity-check anything. So here are our actual bands, what sits inside each, and the honest list of things that push a number up.

Three shapes of engagement

Sprint — from ₹30,000

A fixed, tightly-scoped piece of work delivered in one to two weeks. Two people, one outcome.

What it is good for: a landing page that converts, a performance rescue, a Razorpay integration, an audit with a written report, one new feature on an existing product.

What is included: scoped brief, build, review round, deployment, and a short handover note. What is not: open-ended iteration or “while you are in there, can you also”.

Sprints are 50% at kickoff and 50% at ship. Most first-time clients start here, and honestly they should — it is the cheapest way to find out whether you like working with a studio before you commit to a build.

Full build — from ₹2,00,000

A whole product: strategy, design, engineering, deployment, handover. Four to twelve weeks depending on shape.

Typical bands:

• Marketing site, 6 to 12 pages, custom design and CMS — ₹1L to ₹4L
• Single-purpose mobile app or internal tool — ₹2L to ₹5L
• Product with accounts, payments and an admin panel — ₹4L to ₹8L
• Multi-role platform, marketplace, or dealer portal — ₹8L to ₹20L

Milestone-based payment: 25% at contract, 25% at design sign-off, 25% at build-complete, 25% at production deploy. You are never far ahead of the work, and neither are we.

Our MVP timeline post maps these same shapes to weeks rather than rupees, and the two should be read together — a number without a timeline is not a plan.

Retainer — from ₹40,000 a month

An ongoing slice of the studio. Monitoring, patching, small features, and a standing call. For products that are live and earning.

The mistake we see most often is treating launch as the finish line. Six months of no maintenance turns a healthy codebase into a rescue project, and a rescue costs several times what the retainer would have.

What actually moves a quote

In rough order of impact.

Number of user roles. One role is a product. Three roles — customer, staff, admin — is three products sharing a database. This is the biggest single multiplier, and founders almost always underestimate it.

Payments. Not the integration itself, which is a couple of days. It is the surrounding work: failed payment states, duplicate webhooks, refunds, reconciliation, invoices, GST fields. Our Razorpay and WhatsApp playbook covers what that actually involves.

Content volume. Twelve unique page designs cost more than a template used twelve times. Obvious, and still the most common source of scope drift.

Integrations you do not control. An ERP with no documentation, a logistics API that returns different shapes on different days, a legacy database nobody can explain. We price these with a discovery day first, because guessing is how studios lose money and clients lose trust.

Design ambition. A clean, correct interface is included. Bespoke motion, illustration, 3D and custom type work are craft hours, and they are worth buying when the brand is the differentiator — but they are a choice, not a default.

Deadline compression. Wanting eight weeks of work in five means parallel workstreams and overlap cost. We will say yes, and it will cost more.

What does not move it

“It is just a small change.” Small in interface terms is often large in data terms. Adding a field to a form can mean a migration, an admin change, an export change and a test.

Using our existing components. We reuse heavily and that is already priced in. Nobody pays for us to rebuild a date picker.

Volume promises. “There will be four more projects after this” does not lower the price of this one. It has never once been true in a way that mattered.

How to compare three proposals

You will have quotes from a freelancer, an agency and a studio. They will look incomparable, because they are describing different deliverables. Normalise them:

1. Ask each for the same list — screens, user roles, integrations, environments, test coverage, handover artefacts, support window.
2. Ask who writes the code and can you meet them. Covered in detail in our hiring checklist, and it remains the single most predictive question.
3. Ask what is explicitly excluded. A good proposal has an exclusions section. Its absence is a red flag, not a convenience.
4. Ask what happens after launch. Who holds the credentials, who owns the repository, what a bug costs to fix in month three.

Once all three describe the same product, the spread usually narrows sharply. What is left is the difference in quality and risk, which is the decision you actually wanted to make.

Why we quote ranges, not exact numbers, before scoping

A quote given without a written scope is either padded or wrong, and both are bad for you. We give a band on the first call and a fixed number after a short scoping conversation — usually 45 minutes and a one-page brief.

That brief is the same document that prevents most build failures later. We wrote about what breaks without it, and it stays true regardless of who you hire.

The uncomfortable part

Cheap builds are not cheap. They are expensive later, paid by a different budget line, usually to a different vendor, at a worse moment. We have rebuilt enough ₹80,000 apps at ₹6L to say that plainly.

That does not mean expensive is safe. It means you should buy the smallest correct thing, from someone who will still take your call in month six.

If you want a number for something specific, describe it in three lines and we will give you a band — no meeting required.