Real starting prices, published up front, and what actually moves a quote up from that floor. No "it depends" without the specifics behind it.

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"It depends" is the honest answer to almost every pricing question in software -- and the single most frustrating thing to hear when you're trying to figure out if something fits your budget before you've invested an hour in a conversation about it. The fix isn't pretending everything costs the same regardless of scope. It's publishing real starting numbers and being specific about what pushes a project above them.

The Actual Starting Points

Six categories, six real floors, not bait figures designed to get you on a call before the number changes: workflow automations from $750, custom chatbots from $2,200, agent systems (multiple automations wired together, ongoing) from $6,000 plus $400/month, marketing sites from $1,900, web apps from $6,500, and e-commerce or larger platforms from $9,500. Every one of these is a real number a real project has landed at or above -- not a number chosen to sound approachable and then abandoned the moment a scoping call starts.

Why a Workflow Automation Starts at $750

The floor here is a single, well-defined process: one trigger, one or two systems talking to each other, one clear success condition. "Every Friday, pull the week's orders into a spreadsheet and email it" is a $750-range project. The price climbs with the number of systems involved, how messy the source data actually is once you look at it, and how much the process branches -- a workflow with six exception cases isn't one automation, it's closer to three.

Why a Custom Chatbot Starts at $2,200

The floor covers crawling and indexing a site or document set, wiring up grounded retrieval so answers stay tied to what's actually published (not invented), and an embeddable widget. It climbs with how much content there is to index well, whether it needs to integrate with a booking system or CRM instead of just answering questions, and whether it needs to hand qualified leads to a human partway through a conversation rather than just answering and stopping.

Why Marketing Sites Start at $1,900 and Web Apps Start at $6,500

A marketing site's floor is a handful of custom-designed pages -- not a template with your logo swapped in, but not a web application either. The jump to $6,500 for a web app reflects a categorically different kind of work: real user accounts, a real database, business logic that has to be correct, not just pages that have to look right. The site itself and the software behind a login are different disciplines, and the price difference reflects that, not padding.

Why E-Commerce and Larger Platforms Start at $9,500

Inventory that has to stay accurate, payment processing that has to never silently fail, and usually some combination of both plus a CMS a non-developer can actually use -- this tier is where the things that go wrong get expensive in a way a marketing site's mistakes don't. The floor reflects testing a checkout flow actually has to survive, not just testing that it works once in a demo.

What Actually Moves a Quote Above the Floor

The same four things, across every category: how many systems have to talk to each other, how much existing data or content needs to be cleaned up rather than used as-is, how many exceptions and edge cases the happy-path version doesn't cover, and whether anything needs building from scratch versus configuring something that already does most of the job. None of these are hidden -- they're exactly what gets discussed on the first call, because they're also exactly what determines whether a project takes two weeks or eight.

The Point of Publishing Real Numbers

A published floor does one honest thing: it lets you rule yourself in or out before spending any time at all. If your project is nowhere near these ranges, you've lost ten minutes reading a price list instead of a week waiting for a call to find out the same thing. If it's in range, the first conversation can start on scope instead of starting with "so, roughly, what's your budget" -- which is a worse way to begin a relationship you're hoping lasts past the first invoice.