Realistic Prices for Django Work
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Typical ranges
| Project | Range | Duration |
|---|---|---|
| Small internal tool | £8,000–£15,000 | 6–10 weeks |
| Business application, several workflows | £18,000–£45,000 | 12–20 weeks |
| Customer portal on existing data | £12,000–£28,000 | 8–14 weeks |
| Application with AI capability | £20,000–£50,000 | 14–22 weeks |
What moves the price
- Integrations — each system, and whether it has an API
- Business rule complexity — pricing, approvals, calculations with exceptions
- Data migration from whatever you use now
- Permission complexity
- Reporting, which is consistently underestimated
Screen count is a poor proxy for effort. Twenty similar screens is a template; one screen implementing eight interacting rules is a fortnight.
What should be included
- Tests around the business rules and permissions
- A deployment process and a staging environment
- Monitoring and alerting
- Documentation and handover
- The code, in a repository you own
Running and maintenance
Hosting for a typical business application is £40–£200 a month. Maintenance is 15–25% of build annually, covering dependency updates, Django upgrades and small changes.
Budget it explicitly. Unmaintained applications become progressively more expensive to change, which is how a rewrite proposal eventually appears.
Start with one workflow
Building one workflow properly, in production, in eight weeks tells you far more than a complete specification does — and it produces a much better estimate for the rest.
It also means that if something is wrong, you find out early and cheaply.
Frequently asked questions
Why the wide ranges?
Can we phase it?
Fixed price or hourly?
What about ongoing costs?
Trying to budget for a custom application?
Tell us the process and which systems it touches. We will give you a range with the assumptions stated.
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