The Project Cost Estimator.
Pick what you are building, shape the scope, and get an honest cost range anchored to our published bands, with the drivers that moved it. Two minutes, no email, no single fake number pretending to be a quote.
Two minutes. One honest range.
Pick what you are building, answer a handful of scope questions, and get a cost range anchored to our published bands, with the exact drivers that moved it. Not a quote: an estimate, refined in a scoping call.
Your answers stay in your browser unless you request the emailed breakdown.
Free result, no email needed. Progress autosaves in your browser.
Most teams should buy, not build.
That is a strange thing for a software firm to lead with, and it is still true. If an off-the-shelf product covers the core of what you need, buy it, configure it, and move on. Custom software earns its cost in a narrow set of situations, and these are the four we actually see:
The workflow is the product.
Your edge lives in how the work flows, and renting the same tool as every competitor caps that edge at parity. If the process is what customers pay for, owning it is strategy, not vanity.
The glue costs more than the system.
You are holding five tools together with spreadsheets, exports, and someone re-typing data between screens. When the glue work becomes a real headcount cost, a purpose-built system starts paying for itself.
Per-seat pricing breaks at your scale.
When a tool is priced per user and the whole company needs it, the subscription math can cross the build math. Run that comparison honestly over three years, not one.
You cannot hand the data story to a vendor.
Regulated data, residency requirements, or audit obligations that off-the-shelf terms do not cover. When the compliance answer has to be yours, so does the system.
None of the four apply to you? Save this page for when they do, and buy the tool. If one does apply, the estimator above tells you what honest looks like.
The bands behind every estimate.
These are the published BearPlex cost bands the estimator is anchored to. Every range it produces starts here, so you can check its work.
| What you are buying | From | Typical |
|---|---|---|
| Marketing website (WordPress) | $2,000 | $3,000 to $8,000 |
| Marketing website (Next.js) | $4,000 | $6,000 to $15,000 |
| E-commerce storefront | $4,500 | $8,000 to $25,000 |
| SaaS MVP / custom platform | $15,000 | $25,000 to $80,000 |
| AI system / agent build | $15,000 | $25,000 to $75,000 |
| Custom internal tool / CRM / ops system | $15,000 | $25,000 to $70,000 |
| Embedded engineer (AI-augmented) | $3,000/month per role | Scales with the roles you add |
| Embedded pod (2 senior devs + PM + QA) | $9,500/month | Larger pods to about $20,000/month |
| Care plan / maintenance | $150/month | $350 to $2,000/month |
Embedded work is priced by what ships each month, because our engineers are AI-augmented and the output per person is the point. You will not find an hourly rate here, on purpose.
How the estimate works.
Most cost calculators are a lead form wearing a spreadsheet. This one shows its arithmetic.
Anchored to published bands.
Every estimate starts from the public cost bands on this page. There is no hidden pricing model, and the scoping call uses the same bands you can read here.
Never below the floor.
The low end of every range is clamped to the published starting price for that archetype. A number below the floor would be a number we cannot deliver at, so the tool will not show one.
Conservative multipliers, capped.
Scope selections scale the published typical band, and the combined multiplier is capped. When your scope hits the cap, the tool says so and sends you to a scoping call instead of inventing a bigger number.
Ranges only.
A single figure before a scoping conversation is false precision. The estimator gives a range in $500 steps, names the drivers, and the scoping call turns it into a fixed proposal.
No hourly rates.
Our engineers are AI-augmented, so hours are the wrong unit. Fixed-scope work is priced by the outcome, embedded work by what ships each month.
Your answers stay in your browser.
Progress autosaves to localStorage on your device. Answers are only sent to BearPlex if you request the emailed breakdown, and then only to build the email we send you.
Questions about software cost.
Straight answers with real numbers from our published bands, and nothing invented.
A SaaS MVP or custom platform at BearPlex starts at $15,000, with most projects landing between $25,000 and $80,000. The honest driver of that range is scope discipline: an MVP focused on one core workflow sits near the bottom, while a v1 with multiple user roles, billing, several integrations, and compliance requirements moves toward the top. Anything quoted as a single precise number before scoping is a guess dressed up as a quote; we publish ranges and refine them in a scoping call.
An AI system or agent build at BearPlex starts at $15,000, typically $25,000 to $75,000. A single well-defined task with clear inputs sits at the low end. Multi-step agents that read your data, call tools, and act inside core business systems sit higher, because the engineering that makes AI dependable, evaluation, guardrails, and integration, is where most of the work actually lives. Be skeptical of AI builds priced dramatically below this: it usually means no evaluation and no error handling, which you pay for later.
Depends on the platform and the job. A WordPress marketing site starts at $2,000, typically $3,000 to $8,000: right when your team needs to edit content easily and launch fast. A custom Next.js site starts at $4,000, typically $6,000 to $15,000: right when the website is a serious growth channel and performance and SEO carry real revenue. An e-commerce storefront starts at $4,500, typically $8,000 to $25,000 depending on catalog size, checkout complexity, and integrations. Ongoing care plans start at $150 per month, typically $350 to $2,000 per month depending on how much active work the site needs.
For most teams, buying the SaaS is the right call, and we will tell you that in the first conversation. Custom software earns its cost in a few specific situations: the workflow you need is your competitive advantage and no vendor builds it, per-seat SaaS pricing multiplied across your team and years exceeds what a build would cost, you have data control or compliance requirements a vendor cannot meet, or you need one system that glues together tools that refuse to talk to each other. If none of those apply, configure an existing product and spend the money elsewhere.
A fixed-scope project prices the deliverable: you get a defined system for a defined range, like the bands above. An embedded team prices continuous shipping: an AI-augmented embedded engineer starts at $3,000 per month per role, and a pod of two senior developers plus a project manager and QA runs $9,500 per month, with larger pods ranging to about $20,000 per month. The pod usually wins when the roadmap keeps evolving: you are buying what ships every month, not a one-time artifact. The estimator shows you both framings where they apply.
Bring the problem.We bring the discipline.
Tell us which world your problem lives in, or let the diagnostic find out. The first conversation is with an engineer, not an account manager.
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