Real ranges, not “contact sales”
Most software builds with TantraDev land between $15K and $95K. A focused MVP starts around $25K–$50K (6–10 weeks); custom platforms run $40K–$95K (8–16 weeks); and a dedicated senior pod is $7K–$24K per month. Every engagement is a fixed-scope statement of work with a 30-day exit and 100% IP transfer — no open-ended estimates, no lock-in.
What it actually costs to build
These are our real published ranges. The band you land in depends on scope — we pin an exact number in your fixed-scope SOW after the free architecture audit.
8–16 weeks
Production systems built from first principles — architecture, code, infra, observability. We own the whole stack and hand it back fully documented.
Who it suits: Funded startups and enterprises replacing a brittle internal system or building a core platform.
6–14 weeks
Zero-to-one product builds. A focused MVP starts around $25K–$50K over 6–10 weeks; broader scope (multi-platform, payments, dashboards) lands higher in the band.
Who it suits: Pre-seed to Series A founders who need a real, shippable product in front of users or investors.
4–10 weeks
Migrations, multi-region rebuilds, and cost-optimisation passes. Terraform-everything, Grafana dashboards, and on-call playbooks shipped on day one.
Who it suits: Teams outgrowing a single server, facing a cloud bill that's out of control, or hardening for SOC 2 / scale.
3–12 month engagements
A dedicated 2–6 engineer pod embedded in your team — same Slack, same standups, same git history. Scale up or down with 30 days' notice.
Who it suits: Companies with a roadmap but not enough senior bandwidth, who want capacity without a 9-month hiring cycle.
Pods run 2–6 engineers on 3–12 month engagements with a 30-day notice period. All ranges assume a clear, agreed scope — bigger surface area, regulatory work, or legacy integrations move the number, and we say so up front.
What actually moves the price
Software pricing isn't arbitrary. Six factors explain almost every difference between a $25K build and a $95K one — here's the honest breakdown.
Scope and surface area
Number of user roles, screens, workflows, and integrations. A single-flow MVP and a multi-tenant platform with admin tooling are different projects, not different line items.
Regulatory scope
PCI DSS, HIPAA, RBI, SOC 2, GDPR/DPDP. Compliant work front-loads threat modelling, audit trails, and control implementation — that's real engineering time, not a checkbox.
Integrations with legacy systems
Talking to a clean REST API is cheap. Integrating core banking (Finacle, Flexcube), legacy ERPs, or undocumented internal systems via SOAP/files costs more — most of the risk lives here.
Scale and SLA requirements
A tool for 200 internal users and a platform doing millions of transactions a month with a p95 latency budget demand different architecture, redundancy, and observability.
Design complexity
A clean, conventional UI is fast. Custom interaction design, data-dense dashboards, real-time canvases, and pixel-level brand work add design and front-end hours.
Team size and duration
For pods, your monthly cost scales with how many senior engineers you embed (2–6) and for how long (3–12 months). More engineers means more parallel throughput.
What every engagement comes with
No surprise extras. These aren't upsells — they're the baseline of how we ship, in every band above.
Fixed-scope SOW
A written statement of work with defined deliverables and a fixed price — not an open-ended hourly estimate that drifts.
Senior engineers only
The people who scope your work are the people who build it. No bait-and-switch to juniors after the contract is signed.
Tests, CI/CD, docs, observability
Automated tests, a deploy pipeline, written documentation, and metrics/logging/tracing ship as part of the build — not as a paid extra.
30-day exit clause
Not happy, or priorities changed? Every engagement carries a 30-day notice period. You're never locked in.
100% IP transfer
You own all the code, infrastructure, and design — full IP transfer on payment. No license-back, no hostage repos.
Weekly demos
A working build you can click through every week, plus a first commit by week 2. Progress is visible, not promised.
Priced in USD. Deployed where your data needs to live.
All ranges on this page are in USD to keep the number stable and comparable. We can invoice in INR or other currencies on request — just flag it during the architecture audit. Same engineering, same scope; only the invoice currency changes.
For data residency, we deploy in AWS Mumbai, EU, and US regions depending on where your customers and regulators require the data to sit — India (ap-south-1), EU (Frankfurt / Dublin), or US (us-east-1 / us-west-2). Residency is decided in the audit, not after launch.
Straight answers on cost
The questions every founder and engineering lead asks before they email us.
Get a real number against your real scope
Every engagement starts with a free 30-minute architecture audit. We'll pressure-test your scope, flag what's driving the cost, and hand you a fixed range — no obligation, no sales theatre.