You want a number before you talk to anyone.
Software pricing looks evasive from the outside, and sometimes it is. But the honest reason for the range is that the same sentence describes wildly different amounts of work. 'A booking system' is a weekend if it is a calendar and an email, and it is months if it handles staff rotas, deposits, refunds and no-shows.
What you can reasonably demand is not a single figure but a stated set of assumptions: the price, and the specific things it assumes to be true. Then when an assumption turns out wrong, you can see exactly which one moved the number.
In roughly the order they matter, these are the things that change a quote most.
An agency rate covers the engineer plus the people around them: sales, project management, and the gap between contracts. That structure is worth paying for on large programmes of work with many moving parts.
For the size of work most clients bring — a feature, an integration, a repair, a few weeks of building — that structure is overhead you fund without using. Working directly with an experienced independent developer typically lands well below agency pricing for the same output, because you are paying for the hours that produce the thing.
The build is not the whole cost, and the items below are the ones that surprise people six months later. Ask about them before you sign rather than after.
Because the same description covers very different amounts of work. The range narrows sharply once someone asks a dozen specific questions about your case.
For small and medium work, usually yes, because you are not funding sales and management overhead. For large multi-team programmes the agency structure earns its cost.
Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine
Full-Stack Developer — Websites, Apps, Servers, Databases, AI, SEO & QA
Full-stack developer working across the entire stack — websites, apps, servers, databases, AI integrations, SEO, and QA. Languages & Core: writes code in JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, PHP, Go, and Rust. Architects scalable systems for large-scale projects. Frontend & Interfaces: builds websites and web applications with React and Next.js. Crafts responsive interfaces with Tailwind CSS, Radix UI and Shadcn, adds smooth animations with Framer Motion, and interactive charts with Recharts. SEO Audit & On-Page Optimization: semantic keyword research, resolving technical indexing issues, and optimizing page load speeds. Structures page architecture, meta tags, and multi-language support (i18n). Copywriting & Content Strategy: writes technical articles, drafts precise content briefs for writers, and develops content plans. QA & Testing: full-cycle testing for websites, web services, and Android apps — manual QA for UI/UX and business logic, plus automated testing with Jest, Vitest, Playwright and E2E. Backend, Cloud & Databases: complex API integrations of any scale. Builds servers with Node.js (Express, Fastify). Works with PostgreSQL, MySQL and MongoDB, ORMs (Prisma, Drizzle), and cloud infrastructure (Supabase, Firebase, Cloudflare). Browser Extensions & Automation: develops Manifest V3 browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and other browsers. Builds web scrapers for complex data extraction using Puppeteer and Playwright. AI & Intelligent Agents: builds custom AI agents and integrates LLMs from OpenAI, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude via API, including Claude Code setups. Servers & DevOps: Linux (Ubuntu) and VPS administration — setup, updates, real-time monitoring, secure process isolation, Nginx, PM2, and CI/CD deployment via GitHub Actions. Telegram Bots: develops advanced Telegram bots (Telegraf, Grammy) integrated with AI, payment gateways, Google Sheets, and crypto exchanges. Desktop Applications: builds cross-platform software for Windows and macOS using Electron and Rust. Additional expertise: site development and customization with WordPress and Astro.
AI & Distributed Systems Architect | Enterprise AI, RAG, Cloud, Blockchain | Advisory & Fractional Leadership
AI and distributed systems architect providing advisory and fractional leadership on enterprise AI, RAG pipelines, cloud architecture and blockchain-backed data systems.
Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine
Senior Backend Engineer | AI Engineering | PHP, Python, LLM Applications
Senior backend engineer working across PHP and Python, with a growing focus on AI engineering: building LLM-powered application features on top of existing backend systems and APIs.