Under ₱200,000, buy something instead

My builds start at ₱450,000. When someone arrives with ₱150,000 and a real problem, the tempting move is to scope something down to fit. I have learned not to.

What you get for that money is not a smaller version of the system. It is a prototype: the happy path works, the edge cases do not, there are no permissions worth the name, no audit trail, and no documentation. It will run for a year and then need replacing, which means the client pays twice and has lost a year.

What the money actually buys

The visible part of a build, the screens people click, is maybe a third of the work. The rest is who can see what, what happens when two people edit the same record, what the system does when an integration is down, how twelve years of old data gets in, and what somebody reads when they join the team in two years.

Skipping those is what makes a cheap build cheap. They are also the difference between a system a business runs on and a demo.

What I tell people to do instead

Get as far as you can on tools you can buy. Airtable, Zoho, a properly configured Google Workspace. A local developer for one narrow piece. These are not embarrassing choices, they are the correct ones until the tool genuinely runs out of room.

And when it does run out of room, you will know exactly what you need. You will have a year of real use behind you, you will know which parts matter and which were nice ideas, and the business case for custom software writes itself. Most people arrive at me too early rather than too late.

Why I publish prices at all

Most developers will not put a number on a page. It means every conversation starts with both sides guessing, and someone wastes a meeting.

A published range does two things. It lets someone with no budget yet walk into a finance conversation with a real figure instead of waiting on a quote. And it filters out the enquiries where the gap is too wide to close, before either of us spends an hour finding out.