The rough shape
| Phase | Share | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | 10–20% | Understanding the process, writing down the rules and exceptions |
| Building | 40–50% | The part everyone imagines is the whole project |
| Testing and exceptions | 15–25% | Making it work on the awkward cases |
| Deployment and documentation | 5–15% | Getting it live and leaving it maintainable |
| Project management | 5–15% | Coordination, demonstrations, keeping it moving |
Proportions vary by project. What is consistent is that building is roughly half, and clients consistently expect it to be nearly all.
Why specification is not padding
The specification phase is where someone watches how the work is actually done and writes down the rules nobody has articulated. That is what prevents building the wrong thing.
Every project we have rescued had a thin specification. The build was competent; it was built to a description of the process that was missing the parts that mattered.
Why testing costs what it does
Testing here does not mean checking that buttons work. It means running the awkward cases: the record with unusual characters, the double submission, the third-party system being down, the user with the wrong permissions.
Cutting this makes the project cheaper and moves the cost to your first month in production, at a considerably higher rate.
What you can genuinely cut
- Scope. Fewer features, fewer roles, one intake channel instead of three.
- Design polish on internal tools, where function matters more than finish.
- Admin interfaces, initially — a developer running a query is adequate at first.
- Integrations that can wait for phase two.
- Migration of historical data nobody will look at.
Each of these reduces cost without reducing whether the thing works.
What you should not cut
Exception handling, testing, documentation and the ability to see when something has failed. These are what separate a system you can rely on from a demonstration that ran once.
A supplier who agrees to cut them to hit a number is telling you something about how the project will end.
Where the day rate comes from
A UK development day at £600–£1,200 covers the person doing the work, the people not billable that day, holiday and sickness, tooling, insurance, and the overhead of running a business that will still exist next year.
Rates far below that range usually mean inexperience, an unrealistic quote, or a business that will not be there for the warranty period.