How Much Does It Cost to Develop Software in 2026? Costs in Euros and Sources

How much it costs to develop software depends on what it has to do: how many processes it covers, how many types of user will work with it, which systems it has to talk to and what data it handles. The most reliable Italian benchmark is public procurement: in the 285 contracts through which Italian public bodies and publicly owned companies had software developed in 2024 and 2025, the median value is 26,400 euros and half of the contracts fall between roughly 12,400 and 63,500 euros, according to open data from ANAC, Italy's national anti-corruption authority.

This guide is for business owners, CTOs and IT managers who are weighing up a custom software development project and want an order of magnitude before asking for quotes. It brings together independent sources, each with its date, explains what the cost depends on, compares custom management software with an off-the-shelf product, and sets out what to send vendors to get comparable offers. These are market references, not the price of your software.

In short

• Across 285 public contracts for software development awarded in Italy in 2024-2025, the median value is 26,400 euros and the middle half ranges from 12,398 to 63,500 euros (ANAC open data, WWG analysis).
• For management software alone there are 17 public contracts, with a median value of 57,370 euros: too few for a statistic, but enough to say that management software costs more than a single-purpose tool.
• On the ProntoPro marketplace, jobs by a software developer range from 500 to 20,000 euros, and jobs on management software from 500 to 5,000 euros: small, tightly scoped jobs, almost always by individual freelancers.
• Globally, most software development projects reviewed on Clutch cost between 10,000 and 49,999 dollars; the average project costs about 132,480 dollars and takes about 13 months.
• On top of the development cost come maintenance, hosting, third-party licences and your own people's time: a serious budget looks several years ahead, not just at the first one.

How much does it cost to develop software: the short answer

Custom software for a business costs, in most cases, a few tens of thousands of euros. In Italian public contracts from 2024-2025, the median value is 26,400 euros and two contracts out of three stay under 40,000 euros. One contract in four exceeds 63,500 euros: these are usually the software projects with more processes, users and integrations.

The independent sources available measure different things and should be read together. Figures are given in the source's currency, without conversion.

The three sources describe different buyers. ProntoPro mostly gathers jobs by individual freelancers, tightly scoped and often on existing systems. Clutch measures complete projects by development companies, with analysis, design, testing and release, all over the world. ANAC is the only Italian source published contract by contract: it shows what public bodies and publicly owned companies actually paid, with the limits we will look at further on.

What does the cost of software depend on?

The cost of software depends above all on its scope: which processes it covers, how many types of user work with it, which systems it has to exchange data with, how much data needs migrating and which security requirements it must meet. The number of screens matters less than it seems: an integration with the ERP can take more work than many data-entry forms put together.

• Processes and features. Every process covered needs analysis, development and testing. Software that handles a single workflow, such as support requests, costs much less than software that tracks orders, warehouse and invoicing.
• Users and roles. Every type of user brings extra permissions, screens and test cases. A portal used by employees, customers and suppliers is, in practice, three products sharing the same data.
• Integrations. Connecting the software to ERP, CRM, e-commerce, warehouse, payment or public-sector services requires analysing the available APIs, handling errors and testing against the real systems. If a system does not expose documented APIs, the work grows.
• Data and migration. Importing, cleaning and coding existing data is often the most underestimated item. For Selleria Tombini, before the warehouse could be connected to the e-commerce catalogue, more than 30,000 warehouse items had to be labelled.
• Security and compliance. Personal data, health data, payments or regulated industries add requirements, controls, documentation and audits.
• Interface design. An interface built from standard components costs less than one designed from scratch with user research, but for software used every day by many people, the time users save pays back the work.
• Who develops it and where. According to Clutch, the typical rate is 25-49 dollars an hour globally, but it rises to 50-99 in Poland and the United States and to 100-149 in Canada and Australia. A low rate does not guarantee a low total cost: what counts is the hours needed and the hours lost to rework.

Scope also drives the timeline. Clutch gives a typical duration of about 13 months for a software development project, but a first version with a narrow scope can be much faster: the Wellcam.fit marketplace, with two types of user (clients and personal trainers), was built in 10 weeks, in two-week Sprints.

If the software you have in mind is a smartphone app, the benchmarks change: app stores, iOS and Android platforms, developer accounts. You will find them in our guide to how much it costs to build an app.

Market costs in Italy: what the data says

Public procurement is the only Italian source where software development prices are published contract by contract. We applied to ANAC's open data the same method we used for apps, this time starting from the CPV codes for software development: the categories every public contract uses to declare what it is buying, from application software programming to custom software development. Since 2024, contracts under 40,000 euros also go through the national platform, so small and large contracts are counted the same way.

Out of 12,362 contracts from 2024 and 2025 with a software development CPV code, we kept the 285 whose description covers building new software. We excluded licences, subscriptions, maintenance and enhancements of existing software, packages of hours or days, websites, sign-ups to the national platforms funded by Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), mobile apps, framework agreements, awards to in-house companies, and amounts under 1,000 or over 1 million euros. The result:

• Median value: 26,400 euros.
• Middle half of contracts: between 12,398 and 63,500 euros.
• Under 40,000 euros: 65% of contracts.
• Direct awards: 88%.

Some examples from the ANAC data, each with the CIG code that lets you verify it:

For management software in the strict sense, meaning contracts whose description refers to management software, there are only 17 cases: the median value is 57,370 euros and the middle half ranges from 20,492 to 135,250 euros. With so few contracts the figure is an order of magnitude, not a statistic; it does confirm, though, that management software, which usually covers more processes and more users, costs more than a single-purpose tool.

A public contract is not a private project. The scope is fixed before the award, almost nine contracts out of ten are direct awards, and many amounts cluster just below 40,000 and 140,000 euros, two thresholds that simplify the purchasing procedure. Read it as what a public body actually paid, not as a price list. The method is described in the sources at the bottom of the page; the list of contracts, with their CIG codes, is available on request.

Custom or off-the-shelf management software: how costs compare over time

Off-the-shelf management software costs little at the start and is then paid for every year, usually per user; custom management software costs more at the start and then needs maintenance. To know which is better value, you have to compare the total cost over several years, with the number of users you expect to have, not the first-year quote.

For an honest comparison, ask for quotes for both routes and add up, over at least five years:

1. Setup costs: configuration or development, data migration, training, your own people's time.
2. Recurring costs: subscriptions or licences multiplied by the expected users year by year, or maintenance and hosting of the custom software.
3. Adaptation costs: customisations of the off-the-shelf product, or enhancements of the custom software that you already know you will need.
4. Cost of the manual work that remains: hours spent copying data between systems, fixing errors, preparing reports by hand.

The last item is the one most often forgotten, and sometimes it decides the comparison. COLMAR, a technical sportswear company, had an ERP that did not talk to its other business technologies: store data was copied by hand to feed the store locator on the website. By automating that flow, it saved 320 hours of work a year and more than 20 million API calls. The choice is not always between fully off-the-shelf and fully custom: often it pays to keep the accounting system that works and build the missing piece around it.

If the comparison leans towards custom management software, the next step is to write down the scope of the first version: that is where any reliable quote starts.

Hidden costs: maintenance, hosting, licences and technical debt

The costs that do not appear in the development quote, but that you will pay for the whole life of the software, are five: maintenance, hosting, third-party licences and services, your own people's time, and technical debt. Budget for them from the start and ask for them to be quoted separately.

• Maintenance. This covers bug fixes, security updates, adjustments to new versions of operating systems, browsers and libraries, and changes required by regulations or by external systems. It is usually quoted as a retainer or a bank of hours, with written response times for problems in production.
• Hosting and cloud services. Servers, databases, backups and monitoring grow with users, data and traffic. Ask for an estimate for the first year and for the growth scenario you expect, and make sure the accounts are in your company's name.
• Third-party licences and services. Paid components, email and SMS delivery services, maps, digital signatures, payments, artificial intelligence: many are paid by usage, per call or per user. The COLMAR case, with more than 20 million API calls saved, shows that the way software uses external services is not a detail: when a service is paid by usage, every call adds to the cost.
• Your own people's time. Requirements analysis, demos, acceptance testing, data preparation and training take hours from the people who know the process. They do not appear on any invoice, but a project without those hours costs more.
• Technical debt. The shortcuts taken to deliver sooner, such as code without tests, missing documentation or dependencies that were never updated, make every later change slower and riskier. Ask how the vendor keeps it under control: code review, automated tests, regular dependency updates.

One last item concerns the exit. If one day you want to change vendor, you will need the source code, the documentation and access to every environment. Clarifying this in the contract costs nothing; finding out afterwards can cost a second project.

How to get a comparable quote

To receive comparable quotes, you need to send every vendor the same project description and ask all of them for the same response structure. A single price with no breakdown cannot be compared: it almost always hides assumptions that will surface later as extras.

What to send vendors:

1. Goal and measure of success: what problem the software solves and how you will know it works, for example hours saved or errors avoided.
2. Processes and users: who will use it, with which roles and permissions, and how the work is done today.
3. First-version features: the list ordered by priority, separating what is essential from what can wait.
4. Systems to integrate: names and versions of ERP, CRM, e-commerce and other systems, and whether they expose documented APIs.
5. Data to migrate: where it comes from, in what format, how many records.
6. Constraints: personal data and security, deadlines, preferences for cloud or on-premises servers.
7. After release: who will handle maintenance and support, and with what response times.

What to ask for in return:

• the cost broken down by phase (analysis, design, development, testing, release) and, if possible, by feature;
• the assumptions the price is based on and what is excluded;
• the contract model: a fixed price on a closed scope, or time and materials with a maximum budget;
• recurring costs kept separate from development costs: maintenance, hosting, licences;
• who will work on the project and who will be your point of contact;
• who will own the source code, documentation and accounts.

If a quote puts almost everything into development and almost nothing into analysis and testing, it is not cheaper: it pushes those costs later, when fixing a mistake costs more.

For a first order of magnitude on your own scope, you can start from a software development quote with QuickQuote, which estimates timeline, cost and team structure from a short questionnaire. If you already have offers in hand and are not sure how to read them, send them to us: we will tell you what is missing and what to ask.

WWG is a software house based in Milan that designs and develops software for Italian businesses, with a stable senior team and a single point of contact who follows the project from analysis to maintenance. If you are weighing up a custom software development project, tell us what your software needs to do: we will tell you whether it makes more sense to build it, buy it or integrate what you already have.

Do you already have answers to the questions in this guide? Use them for an estimate with QuickQuote, or write to us at business@wwg.it.

Sources

• ANAC, Banca Dati Nazionale dei Contratti Pubblici (National Public Contracts Database), open datasets CIG 2024, CIG 2025 and Aggiudicazioni (awards) (CC BY 4.0 licence; downloaded on 5 October 2026; WWG analysis of 9 October 2026: contracts with CPV code 72200000, 72210000, 72211000, 72212xxx, 72230000, 72232000, 72240000 or 72262000, a description covering the building of new software, and an award amount between 1,000 euros and 1 million euros; excluding licences, subscriptions, maintenance and enhancements, packages of hours, websites, PNRR measures for signing up to the national platforms, mobile apps, framework agreements and in-house awards). Datasets: CIG 2024 · CIG 2025 · Aggiudicazioni
• ProntoPro, "Sviluppatore Software" (software developer; prices on the platform, consulted and archived on 9 October 2026): web.archive.org
• ProntoPro, "Sviluppo Software Gestionale" (management software development; prices on the platform, consulted and archived on 9 October 2026): web.archive.org
• Clutch, Software Development Company Pricing Guide 2026 (updated on 21 September 2026; archived on 5 October 2026): web.archive.org
• Case studies published by WWG: COLMAR, store locator (320 hours a year and 20 million API calls saved); Selleria Tombini, e-commerce and warehouse (more than 30,000 warehouse items); Wellcam.fit, marketplace built in 10 weeks.