Pricing
No price list. No games either.
A custom system's cost depends on what it has to do, so a published menu would be fiction. Here is everything we can say honestly before we have met.
Straight answer
Why there is no price list, and what we will tell you.
What a custom system costs depends entirely on what it has to do: how many parts of the business it covers, how many systems it has to talk to, how much history has to come with it. Two companies of the same size can be an order of magnitude apart. A published menu would be a number we invented for the page rather than one we could stand behind, and you would find that out at the quote.
Hiding everything behind “contact us” wastes your time too. So everything below is what we can say honestly before we have met: how the cost behaves compared to what you are paying now, what the two engagement shapes are, what moves the number up, what is never included, and where the limits are. The only thing missing is the figure that requires knowing your business.
How it compares
The comparison is not to zero. It is to what you already spend.
A BusinessOS engagement typically starts at a fraction of what a company of the same size pays annually in per-seat subscriptions across its software stack.
And unlike those subscriptions, the cost does not increase every time you hire someone. That is the structural difference: one line stays flat as you grow, the other tracks your headcount upward forever.
Per-seat math
What you're paying now.
Move the slider to your headcount, switch off anything you don't run, and edit any price to match your contract.
- CRM$/seat/mo
- IT service management$/seat/mo
- Project management$/seat/mo
- HR platform$/seat/mo
- Helpdesk / support$/seat/mo
- E-signature$/seat/mo
- BI / reporting$/seat/mo
- Estimated per-seat spend, per year
- $353,700
- The same over five years
- $1,768,500
- Seats carrying no BusinessOS per-user fee
- 75 of 75
$393 per person per month across 7 platforms.
Adding people to a system you own does not add a license line.
Estimate only, based on published list prices. Your actual spend depends on your contracts. This does not include the cost of building and running a custom system.
What you are really comparing
Three different shapes, not three prices.
Structural differences only. No benchmark figures, and no prices for anyone else’s products.
| BusinessOS | Per-seat SaaS stack | Internal developer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost behavior as headcount grows | Flat. Adding people does not add per-user license cost. | Rises with every hire, on every platform, every year. | Rises in steps — each additional developer is a salary. |
| Who owns the result | You own the source code and the data. | The vendor owns the software. You hold an account. | You own it, and you own the hiring risk with it. |
| If you stop paying | You keep the code and the data, and can host or move it. | Access ends. Your data is exportable at best. | The work stops when the person leaves. |
| Customization limits | Bounded by what is worth building, not by a product roadmap. | Bounded by configuration options the vendor chose to expose. | Unbounded in theory, bounded by one person's capacity. |
| Who maintains it | An engineering team under a written service agreement. | The vendor, on their schedule and their priorities. | The individual you hired — and nobody, when they are away. |
| Continuity risk | Documented, conventional code another team could take over. | Vendor pricing changes, feature removals, acquisitions. | Single point of knowledge failure. |
Before anything is agreed
Discovery costs nothing.
A couple of meetings, no fee, no obligation. We map how work actually moves through your business, where it stalls, what gets typed twice, and identify what a first release should remove. You leave with a clear view of what is worth building first, whether or not you continue with us.
This is possible because discovery is not a separate billable phase in our model. It is continuous and part of how the engagement runs — so there is nothing to protect by charging for the first two conversations, and no way for us to quote a custom system honestly without having them.
Engagement
The two ways to build.
Ongoing Evolution
A term-based engagement with flat monthly billing that covers the system, its hosting and continuous development against agreed capacity. Discovery and refinement are built in throughout, so the system keeps being reshaped as the business changes.
Defined Project
An agreed scope at a project price, with a clear finish. Suited to a bounded problem where you know what the outcome needs to be.
Both carry a flat monthly service fee for hosting, backups, support and core updates. It is included during an active evolution engagement, and billed separately afterwards.
Variables
What moves the number.
Number of integrations
Every system that has to exchange data adds design, testing and long-term maintenance.
Data migration complexity
Clean, structured, well-understood data moves quickly. Twelve years of spreadsheets does not.
Departments in scope
One team's workflow is a smaller problem than four departments handing work to each other.
Regulatory requirements
Sectors with audit, retention or access obligations need those designed in from the start.
Replacing versus connecting
Replacing a platform carries migration and change management. Connecting to one carries integration work.
Excluded
What is never included.
- Third-party usage costs for AI, SMS, email and storage — these are billed at cost and depend on your volume.
- Regulated financial functions.
- Compliance certifications.
- Payroll, payment processing and accounting engines — we integrate with these rather than rebuild them.
Limits
Where we’re precise about limits.
Neither model is unlimited development. Development capacity is agreed in writing before it starts, so both sides know what a month contains. The monthly service fee covers running the system — hosting, backups, support and core updates — not building unlimited new features.
Final invitation
What would your business look like with fewer steps?
Tell us about the systems that don't talk to each other, the process that still runs on a spreadsheet, the report someone rebuilds every month. That conversation is how every Business OS we build starts.