The Business Owner's Software Budget Guide
Four pages on what to pin down before you ask anyone for a price, what projects actually cost, and what to argue about in a quote.
Most people asking what custom software costs get told “it depends,” then get three quotes that are nothing like each other and no way to tell which one is honest.
This is the guide I wish I could hand people before that happens.
Four pages, no filler
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01
What to clarify before you ask for a price. Eight things that turn a guess into a number, and the one sentence that saves more projects than any other.
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02
What projects like yours actually cost. Real fixed-price bands for the four most common types of small business build.
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03
Whether it pays for itself. A worksheet for the arithmetic almost nobody does, and what a reasonable payback period looks like.
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04
Ten questions to ask before you sign, plus the six red flags that should stop you.
Written by Christopher McGrath, who has spent twenty years building and rescuing business software. Load Bearing Code is a one-person shop, so the person who wrote this is the person who would do the work.