How much custom software costs in Colombia

Because custom software is quoted by the work it demands, and that work changes with every company. The same request can mean a simple form or a platform with several applications and integrations. A published price would force a provider to overcharge some clients and lose money on others. The honest thing is to publish the range, in our case COP 5 million to COP 500 million, and explain what moves it.

Within the range of COP 5 million to COP 500 million, a mobile app rarely lands at the low end, because it means building for Android and iPhone, passing store review and almost always adding a web panel the office uses to feed it. How far it climbs depends on whether it has to work offline, use GPS or the camera, connect to your existing systems, and how many types of user it serves. With the process clear and the integrations listed, someone can tell you where in the range it falls. Without that, any figure is invented.

It can be cheaper in the initial quote and more expensive by the end. A freelancer works well for a small, well-defined scope one person can cover alone. The risk is continuity: if they get sick, take a job or change priorities, the project stops and the next team has to understand someone else’s code. Compare like for like against the same written scope, and ask who maintains the system after delivery.

It depends on three things: hosting, which is paid recurrently to the cloud provider and grows with usage; maintenance, which covers security, failures and adjustments forced by external changes; and the new features the business asks for. A serious quote states how each one is billed before you sign. Ask as well whether the hosting sits in an account under your own name, because that is what lets you change maintenance providers if you ever need to.

It is one of the usual ways to contract software development and, for most mid-sized companies, the most sensible one. Each phase has its own scope, deliverables and price, and you decide the next one with what you learned from the last. At GeekCorp the scope document presents the budget split by phase, stating what each one includes. That lets you start with the process that hurts most without committing the whole budget at once.

It falls inside the same range of COP 5 million to COP 500 million, and it depends on what the assistant has to do, how much documentation it has to learn and which systems it has to connect to. An assistant that answers questions about your internal manuals is a different project from one that drafts technical reports the way your specialists would. The heaviest factor is not the technology: it is having the expert available and a set of already-approved examples to test against. On AI projects we work on enterprise API plans from providers such as Anthropic and OpenAI, where the information you send is not used to train their models.

If the scope was written down, the answer is simple: anything outside it gets quoted separately before it is built, and you decide whether it goes in now, in a later phase or never. Projects blow their budget when there was no scope to begin with, or when things were added without being quoted. That is why the scope document matters more than the price: it is what protects you when someone says "while we’re at it".

It takes as long as understanding your operation takes. A documented process, with real examples and the person who runs it available to talk, gets quoted quickly; a process that has to be uncovered across several meetings takes longer. That stage is our initial consultation, which has no cost; if there is a fit, the next step is a scope document with a budget per phase. We work remotely with clients outside Colombia, we sign an NDA before seeing any of your information, and the shared time zone means calls happen inside your business hours, not at the edges of them.