Transparent Pricing
Own your software. Pay once.
We engineer custom business software with a fixed-cost milestone pricing model. No subscriptions, no seat licenses, and zero vendor lock-in.
Quick answer: what a custom ERP costs
A custom ERP from ERPStack costs $25,000 to $250,000 as a one-time, fixed-price build, delivered in 6 to 24 weeks and invoiced per accepted milestone. Three variables move the number: the module count (3–5, 6–12 or 15+), the number of systems it has to integrate with, and whether it must stand up to a SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR or PCI DSS control regime. There is no per-seat licence, so headcount growth moves your cloud bill rather than the price of the software.
The Milestone Pricing Model
Unlike SaaS providers who bill you monthly per seat, or software development agencies charging hourly rates that lead to scope creep, ERPStack operates strictly on fixed-price milestone delivery.
1. Discovery & Architecture
We establish the entity-relationship diagrams, VPC networking schemas, data residency boundaries, and API ingestion specs, creating a concrete engineering blueprint before writing code.
2. Phased Milestone Building
We implement vertical slices of application logic in bi-weekly sprints. Every milestone is deployed to a staging environment and verified with automated test suites before signing off.
3. Code Handover & Sunset
At completion, we hand over full code ownership. This includes the Git repository, Terraform state files, database migration histories, and environment secrets. The software becomes your capital asset.
Typical Custom System Budgets
Custom software is a high-yield asset. Below are the typical fixed-cost project ranges based on operational scope and compliance requirements.
Standard B2B Operations
Single-tenant system with isolated relational databases, role-based access control (RBAC), custom workflow states, basic reporting filters, and secure integrations with up to two third-party REST APIs. Delivery: 6–8 weeks.
Discuss PlanCompliance & Multi-Tenant
Multi-tenant SaaS platform featuring schema-level database isolation, built-in compliance logging (HIPAA/SOC2 controls), automated backup routines, custom invoice engines, and 5+ deep integrations. Delivery: 10–16 weeks.
Discuss PlanEnterprise Scale Infrastructure
High-frequency transactional ledgers, double-entry bookkeeping systems, ClickHouse analytics nodes, multi-region active replicas, specialized inventory pipelines, and automated source code escrow. Delivery: 18–24 weeks.
Discuss PlanRisk reversal
The Milestone One Guarantee
Milestone One is Discovery & Architecture: your entity-relationship diagram, VPC and data-residency design, integration specification, and a costed build plan. Read it, and if you decide not to continue, ask for a refund within 14 days and we return the fee in full. No reason required. You keep the document either way — it is yours under a perpetual licence, to hand to any vendor you like.
Most vendors guarantee the free consultation. This one is attached to money you have actually spent.
Written into Section 6b of our Terms of Service, not just this page. Read the clause
Total Cost of Ownership (3-Year Horizon)
Renting standard SaaS software is a continuous taxation. Building custom software creates a capital asset that pays for itself within months.
| Cost / Capability | ERPStack (Custom Core) | Monolithic SaaS (SAP, NetSuite) | Mid-Market (Odoo, Zoho) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Initial build / implementation | $25,000 – $250,000 (one-time) | $50,000 – $150,000 (base setup) | $10,000 – $40,000 (setup) |
| Licensing, years 1–3 | $0 | $50,000 – $300,000 | $20,000 – $80,000 |
| Hosting, years 1–3 | $7,000 – $25,000 (your cloud account) | Included in licence | Included in licence |
| Maintenance & enhancement, years 1–3 | $11,000 – $113,000 (≈15%/yr of build) | $15,000 – $90,000 (partner retainer) | $6,000 – $36,000 (partner retainer) |
| Total 3-year spend | $43,000 – $388,000 | $115,000 – $540,000 | $36,000 – $156,000 |
| Code & data ownership | 100% client owned | Rented (vendor lock-in) | Rented (vendor lock-in) |
| Per-seat scaling cost | $0 (unlimited users) | $99/user/mo | $37/user/mo |
How these numbers are built
Ranges assume a 25–150 seat mid-market deployment. Custom maintenance is modelled at 15%/yr of build cost — the same convention used by our ROI calculator, so the two always agree. Hosting assumes managed Postgres plus edge compute in your own cloud account. SaaS licence and setup ranges are list-price observations for comparable mid-market deployments; Oracle and SAP do not publish list pricing, so treat those two as indicative and ask us for the quotes we have actually seen.
Where custom loses: below roughly 25 seats, or where an off-the-shelf mid-market suite already fits your process without modification, the mid-market column is cheaper over three years and we will tell you so. Custom wins when licence spend compounds with headcount, or when the process you need is the thing the template cannot do — but against the cheapest mid-market suites that crossover never arrives at any headcount we model, and the table below says so by name. It prices the same trade seat by seat, from 10 to 500 seats, over 3 and 5 years.
At what headcount does building cost less than licensing?
The whole curve rather than one worked example: three-year and five-year total cost of ownership at six deployment sizes, with the arithmetic and its sources printed underneath so you can rebuild it against the quote you are actually holding.
| Seats | Oracle NetSuite | Microsoft Dynamics 365 | Odoo Enterprise | Custom build (ERPStack) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 seatsExtrapolated: outside the 25–250 seat range these bands cover | 3-yr $50,0005-yr $83,000 | 3-yr $28,000cheaper than building5-yr $47,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $10,000cheaper than building5-yr $17,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $44,0005-yr $57,000 |
| 25 seatsCrossover row — from here up, building costs less than every suite in this table that crosses at all | 3-yr $75,0005-yr $125,000 | 3-yr $60,0005-yr $100,000 | 3-yr $15,000cheaper than building5-yr $25,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $56,0005-yr $72,000 |
| 50 seats | 3-yr $117,0005-yr $194,000 | 3-yr $113,0005-yr $189,000 | 3-yr $23,000cheaper than building5-yr $39,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $76,0005-yr $97,000 |
| 100 seats | 3-yr $200,0005-yr $333,000 | 3-yr $220,0005-yr $367,000 | 3-yr $40,000cheaper than building5-yr $67,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $116,0005-yr $147,000 |
| 250 seats | 3-yr $450,0005-yr $750,000 | 3-yr $540,0005-yr $900,000 | 3-yr $90,000cheaper than building5-yr $150,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $235,0005-yr $296,000 |
| 500 seatsExtrapolated: outside the 25–250 seat range these bands cover | 3-yr $867,0005-yr $1,444,000 | 3-yr $1,073,0005-yr $1,789,000 | 3-yr $173,000cheaper than building5-yr $289,000cheaper than building | 3-yr $435,0005-yr $545,000 |
| Crossover — the seat count at which building costs less | 3-yr below 25 seats5-yr below 25 seats | 3-yr below 25 seats5-yr below 25 seats | 3-yr never crosses5-yr never crosses | Not applicable — the reference option |
The one published price in this table
Microsoft is the only vendor here that publishes a per-user price at all. On 15 August 2026 its Business Central pricing page listed Essentials at $80.00 per user per month and Premium at $110.00, both paid yearly. The Dynamics 365 column above runs at 75–83% of that Essentials list across the 25–250 seat range, so this table prices Microsoft below Microsoft’s own published page. Priced at the published Essentials rate instead, the crossover lands at below 25 seats over 3 years, below 25 seats over 5. Microsoft, Dynamics 365 Business Central pricing
Where the other numbers come from, and when they were collected
- Oracle NetSuite — $25,000 - $150,000+ / year
- ERPStack estimate for 25-250 seats — not an Oracle quote and not a list price. No Oracle-published NetSuite figure was readable on 15 August 2026 (netsuite.com refuses automated requests), so the floor is anchored to the nearest suite that does publish one: Dynamics 365 Business Central at $80-$110 per user per month is about $24,000 a year at 25 seats (microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics-365/products/business-central/pricing, read 15 August 2026). Get the base licence, the modules, and the year-2 and year-3 renewal price in writing.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 — $20,000 - $180,000+ / year
- Derived from Microsoft published Dynamics 365 per-user licensing at 25-250 seats, plus typical partner implementation fees. Verify at microsoft.com/dynamics-365/pricing. Collected July 2026.
- Odoo Enterprise — $5,000 - $30,000+ / year
- Derived from Odoo published per-user Enterprise pricing plus typical implementation-partner fees, at 25-250 seats. Verify current per-user pricing at odoo.com/pricing. Collected July 2026.
Where building loses
Odoo Enterprise never crosses: at every seat count in this table, over both horizons, the cost of licensing stays below the cost of building. At the 10-seat row the same is true of Microsoft Dynamics 365. If a packaged suite fits your process without modification, it is cheaper than hiring us, and we would rather you read that here than discover it after a discovery milestone. What no column prices is the cost of changing how you work to fit the product. We have no defensible number for that, so it is absent from every column — and it is usually the variable that actually settles the question.
Reading the edges of the table
The 10-seat and 500-seat rows lie outside the 25–250 seat range these bands were collected over, so they are straight-line extrapolation and the table labels them as such. At 500 seats the build model returns $270,000, above the $250,000 headline — that is the open-ended top of our published range rather than a figure outside it. The custom column uses the same coefficients as our ROI calculator, so the two agree by construction rather than by proofreading.
Pricing FAQ
How much does custom ERP development cost?
ERPStack pricing for a custom ERP runs between $25,000 and $250,000 (₹20 lakhs to ₹2 crores) under fixed-price milestone contracts with no per-seat fee. Three things move the number: how many modules the system replaces (3–5, 6–12 or 15+), how many external systems it must integrate with, and whether it has to satisfy a control regime such as SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA or GDPR. Compliance and multi-tenancy are what move a project from the $25,000–$60,000 tier into the $60,000–$150,000 tier.
What is the pricing model of ERPStack?
ERPStack pricing is per milestone, not per hour and not per seat. Each milestone is scoped and priced before work starts, deployed to a staging environment, and invoiced Net-30 only once your team accepts it. Milestone One is Discovery and Architecture and is refundable in full on written request within 14 days of delivery, under Section 6b of the Terms of Service. No recurring subscription, user licence or renewal cycle is attached to anything ERPStack delivers.
Are there monthly seat licensing fees for custom ERPs?
No. ERPStack pricing carries no per-user charge at all, because you own 100% of the source code, the PostgreSQL database and the Terraform infrastructure outright. Adding 50 staff, 200 partners or an unlimited customer portal moves your cloud bill, not a licence line. Mid-market SaaS suites charge $37–$165 per user per month by comparison — ERPStack’s own observed range, not a rate any single vendor publishes — which is where a 3-year total cost of ownership diverges most sharply from a one-time build.
How long does a custom ERP take to build?
An ERPStack build takes 6 to 24 weeks, and the three pricing tiers track the same three bands. A standard B2B operations system with RBAC and up to 2 REST integrations lands at 6–8 weeks; a multi-tenant or compliance platform with 5+ deep integrations takes 10–16 weeks; enterprise infrastructure with transactional ledgers, ClickHouse analytics and multi-region replicas takes 18–24 weeks. Discovery and Architecture occupies the first 1–2 weeks, and you are testing working software in staging from roughly week 3 onward.
Do you offer monthly payments?
ERPStack pricing bills against milestones rather than a calendar, so payments arrive as deliverables do — typically every 2 to 4 weeks on an active build. Each invoice is Net-30 from the moment your technical team accepts that milestone in the staging environment. There is no monthly retainer, no minimum term and nothing to cancel, because you are paying for delivered software rather than for continued access to it.
What industries do you serve?
ERPStack builds for healthcare (HIPAA and HITRUST CSF control baselines), finance and fintech (PCI DSS, SOC 2 Type II), logistics, manufacturing, retail, insurance, legaltech, edtech, government and NGO operations. The vertical mainly changes the compliance regime and the integration surface rather than the pricing band: a manufacturing MRP build and a healthcare portal of the same module count sit in the same $60,000–$150,000 tier.
Related reading: 41 more answered questions, how custom ERP delivery works, ERPStack vs Oracle NetSuite, sector-specific builds and the procurement fact sheet.
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