Why the Cheapest Software Quote Will Cost You More
You have three quotes on your desk. One is $45,000. One is $72,000. One is $28,000. The $28K quote looks like a bargain. Same features, same timeline, much lower price. Twelve months later, you have spent $28K on the initial build, $18K on emergency fixes, $15K on performance optimization the original team could not handle, and you are now looking at a $65K rebuild because the codebase cannot support the features your growing user base needs. Total cost: $126,000. The $72K quote would have saved you $54,000 and about 400 hours of your time.
This is not a hypothetical. We rebuild software for a living - not by choice, but because roughly 30% of the projects that come to us are rescues. Products that were built cheaply, launched successfully, and then collapsed under the weight of technical debt, poor architecture, or a development team that disappeared. The pattern is so consistent that we can usually predict the failure points before we even open the codebase.
What Corners Get Cut in Cheap Builds
Low-cost development teams are not magicians. They charge less because they spend less time. And the places where they save time are predictable.
No Automated Testing
Automated tests (unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests) typically account for 20-30% of development time. Cutting them saves the team hundreds of hours on a mid-size project. The immediate result looks fine - the app works when you click around. The long-term result is that every change risks breaking something else, and nobody knows until a user reports it. We recently audited a 40,000-line codebase built by a budget team. It had exactly zero tests. Adding a simple feature to the checkout flow broke the user registration process. Nobody caught it for two weeks.
No Code Reviews
Code reviews are where senior developers catch mistakes, enforce standards, and mentor juniors. They take time - typically 2-4 hours per week per developer. Budget teams skip them. The result is inconsistent code quality, duplicated logic, security vulnerabilities, and an architecture that drifts in different directions because every developer does things their own way.
Hardcoded Values and No Configuration
Proper software externalizes configuration - API keys, feature flags, environment-specific settings. This takes discipline and a bit more time. Cheap builds hardcode these values directly in the source code. When you need to change an API endpoint, someone has to search through the codebase and update it in 14 different places. When you want to deploy to a staging environment, you discover it is hardwired to production. This is one of the most common issues we find in rescue projects.
No Error Handling
Robust error handling - catching failures, retrying operations, logging errors, showing users meaningful messages - adds 15-20% to development time. Without it, your app works perfectly in ideal conditions and falls apart when anything goes wrong. The payment gateway times out and the user sees a blank white screen. The file upload fails and the data is silently lost. The third-party API returns an unexpected format and the entire page crashes. These are not edge cases. They are Tuesday.
Security Shortcuts
Security is invisible until it fails. Budget teams routinely skip input validation, store passwords with weak hashing (or in plain text - yes, we still see this), expose API endpoints without authentication, and leave debug information visible in production. One client came to us after a data breach that exposed 12,000 customer records. The breach vector was an API endpoint that returned user data without checking if the requester was authorized. Fixing that would have taken 4 hours during initial development. The breach cost the company over $200,000 in notification, legal fees, and lost customers.
Real Examples of Rebuild Costs
Here are three projects we rebuilt in the past two years, with the original cost and the total cost including the rebuild.
- E-commerce platform - Original build: $22K (offshore team, 8 weeks). Problems: no caching (pages loaded in 8+ seconds), SQL injection vulnerabilities, no mobile responsiveness despite it being in the spec. Patch work: $12K over 6 months. Rebuild: $58K. Total: $92K. A quality build would have cost $65K.
- SaaS analytics dashboard - Original build: $35K (freelance developer, 12 weeks). Problems: monolithic JavaScript file with 15,000 lines, no state management, memory leaks that crashed the browser after 20 minutes of use. Patch work: $8K. Rebuild: $75K (with proper React architecture). Total: $118K. A quality build would have cost $80K.
- Healthcare scheduling app - Original build: $18K (budget agency, 6 weeks). Problems: patient data stored without encryption, no HIPAA compliance despite client requesting it, calendar logic broke on timezone boundaries. Emergency security remediation: $15K. Rebuild: $45K. Total: $78K. A quality build would have cost $50K.
In every case, the rebuild cost 1.5-3x what a quality first build would have cost. And that does not account for the lost time - typically 6-12 months of operating with a broken product, missed market opportunities, and damaged user trust.
How to Spot an Unsustainable Quote
Not every low quote is a trap. Some teams are genuinely efficient, work in lower-cost regions, or have reusable components that reduce effort. Here is how to tell the difference between a legitimately efficient team and one that is cutting corners.
- Ask what is excluded - a good team will clearly state what is not in the quote (testing approach, deployment, documentation, post-launch support). A corner-cutting team will say everything is included at a suspiciously low price.
- Ask about their testing strategy - if the answer is "we do manual testing" or "our developers test their own code," expect bugs. Professional teams use automated testing and have dedicated QA processes.
- Ask for a code sample or architecture diagram from a similar project - quality teams are proud of their work and will share examples. Teams that produce spaghetti code will avoid this question.
- Check the team composition - if a $30K project is being built by one junior developer, the math does not work for quality output. That developer would need to work at senior speed with zero mistakes for three months.
- Look at the timeline - if a complex project is quoted at both the lowest price and the shortest timeline, something does not add up. Fast and cheap always sacrifices quality.
When a Lower Quote Is Legitimate
Some scenarios produce genuinely lower quotes without sacrificing quality. Teams in Eastern Europe or Latin America often charge 30-50% less than US or Western European teams while delivering comparable work. Teams that have built similar products before can reuse architecture and components, reducing effort by 20-40%. And teams that use modern frameworks with strong conventions (like Next.js or Rails) can move faster than those using raw toolkits.
The key difference: a legitimate lower quote will still include testing, code reviews, documentation, and a reasonable timeline. It saves money through efficiency, not by skipping essential practices. If a quote is 30% lower than average, it could be efficiency. If it is 60% lower, it is almost certainly cutting corners.
The Math That Matters
Before you sign the cheapest quote, run this calculation. Take the three quotes you received. Add 50% to the cheapest one (for the patch work and fixes you will inevitably need). Compare that adjusted number to the mid-range quote. In our experience, the adjusted cheap quote exceeds the mid-range quote about 80% of the time. And that 50% buffer is conservative - it does not account for a full rebuild if the code is truly unsalvageable.
The mid-range quote from a team with strong references, a clear process, and a reasonable timeline is almost always the best value. Not the cheapest. Not the most expensive. The one where the price matches the work and the team can explain exactly how they will spend every dollar.
