The short answer
For a small or mid-sized company, one focused piece of custom software usually costs between €2,000 and €25,000: an integration between two tools at the low end, an internal tool for one team at the high end. A platform that replaces several systems starts around €30,000. The price is set by scope (how many hours the work takes), far more than by the hourly rate.
That is why two quotes for “the same project” can differ five times: the vendors are pricing different projects. Below are the assumptions, the maths for four typical projects, and what to do before you ask anyone for a price.
What goes into the price?
Every estimate is hours multiplied by a rate, plus what it costs to keep the software running. The rate depends on who builds it.
Sources: Eurostat labour cost levels, information and communication sector, 2025 (lc_lci_lev); Lemon.io rate calculator for Latvia, Q3 2026. The €60 rate is an assumption for the examples, not a quote.
The Eurostat figure is what an employer pays for one hour of an IT employee's time. An agency or studio rate sits above it because it also pays for the hours nobody bills: estimating, meetings, testing, fixing, and the weeks between projects. Freelancers are cheaper per hour, but you take on the project management yourself.
The hours are the bigger lever. These are typical ranges for well-defined work. They assume the process was mapped first, so nobody builds the wrong thing.
What do typical projects cost?
Hours × €60. Illustrative ranges for well-scoped work, not quotes. Running costs (hosting, monitoring, updates) come on top, usually a small monthly fee.
Most of the spread inside each range comes from three things: how many systems the software has to talk to, how messy the existing data is, and how many people have to agree on how the process should work. The code itself is rarely the expensive part. Unclear scope is.
The Standish Group's CHAOS research is old, but its finding has held up: small, well-defined projects succeed far more often than big ones. The cheapest way to buy software is in small pieces, each one paying for itself before the next one starts.
How to get a price you can trust
Start with the process, not the software. A one-hour session where you walk through how work actually moves (who types what, where, and how often) turns a vague project into a list of concrete pieces with hours next to them. That is what makes an estimate reliable. We call it Process Mapping, and for qualified companies it is free.
Then build the most valuable piece first. Our own model is one fixed price for a 3-month build cycle in two-week sprints, currently an introductory €4,750 for the whole cycle, with a first working version in about four weeks. After that, improvements come in monthly product sprints. You see what each step costs before it starts, and you can stop after any of them.
Fixed price or time and materials? Fixed price works when the scope is mapped. Time and materials is fairer while it is still being discovered. A sensible order is a short paid or free discovery, then a fixed price for each next step.
Two more things change the real cost in Latvia. The LIAA digitalisation programme has co-funded the purchase of digital solutions for small and medium-sized companies, so check whether a call is open. And compare the build cost with what the manual work costs you today. What manual work really costs shows how to calculate it, and the savings calculator does the maths for your own tasks.
See what your first step would cost
The free Company Analysis takes about five minutes. It looks at your website and your answers and suggests where custom software would pay back first, with example numbers.
