With me, replacing a spreadsheet with a simple app starts at $2,500 for a small first build. Before that there’s a free call, and an optional $400 written plan. Whether it’s worth it comes down to one number only you have: how many hours a week the spreadsheet costs your team.
What do you actually pay for?
Here is every price, the same ones on my pricing page:
| Step | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Discovery call | Free | You tell me what’s slow. I tell you straight if it’s worth fixing. |
| Blueprint | $400 | A written plan with a price on each step. Comes off the first invoice if you hire me. |
| Build | from $2,500 | The app itself, quoted one phase at a time. |
| Ongoing | from $500/mo | Bugs fixed free, plus a set amount of build time each month. |
You don’t have to take every step. Stopping after the call is fine.
Why can a first build be that small?
Because a spreadsheet is usually doing one or two jobs well and one job badly. You don’t need all of it rebuilt. You need the bad part fixed.
For example: three people type the same order into the sheet at different times, and someone spends Friday afternoon working out which copy is right. A small app fixes that part. One form, one list, everyone sees the same thing. The rest of the sheet can stay a sheet.
That’s also why I quote per phase. If the first phase works, we price the next one. If it doesn’t, you’ve spent $2,500, not your whole budget.
What “one phase at a time” looks like
A coatings shop I work with ran on Google Sheets. The first thing I built for them was not the app they use now. It was an Android app with a proper database behind it — and later we worked out that a web app on a tablet was the better answer, so that is what they run today.
Two things worth taking from that. The first build was worth paying for even though it was not the last one; it got the shop off the sheet. And nobody could have priced the whole arc on day one, because on day one we did not yet know the tablet answer was the right one. That is why I quote a phase at a time instead of handing you one number for a vision neither of us has worked out yet.
How do I know if it’s worth it?
Do the math with your own numbers. I can’t do this part for you, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who says they can without asking.
The break-even check
- 1Hours a week your team spends copying, checking or fixing the sheet.
- 2Times what an hour of their time costs you.
- 3Times 50 weeks. That's what the sheet costs you a year.
- 4If that is more than the build price, it pays for itself inside a year.
If the answer is small, keep the spreadsheet. I wrote a whole post on when you should not build custom software, and I mean it.
What should I watch out for in a quote?
- One big price for everything. Nobody knows what the last phase costs before the first one ships. A single number that big is a guess.
- A monthly fee you can’t leave. Ask what happens to your app and your data if you stop paying. You should own both.
- No mention of fixing bugs. Ask who pays when something breaks next year.
Where do I start?
Book the free call. Bring the spreadsheet, or just describe it. If it’s worth fixing, I’ll say so. If it isn’t, I’ll say that too.
See every price on the pricing page, or try the stockroom demo to see what a small app that replaces a stock sheet looks like.