What it costs
Two ways to pay for a build, three bands, a matrix of where the money goes, a calculator that puts the stack you rent now next to one build you own, and a retainer if you want us to run it.
Two ways to pay
Pick at the start · the same build either wayEvery band can be paid off. Move the price to your band and the term to what suits the cash flow; the two columns show exactly what leaves the account and when. A fixed quote replaces the slider once the scope is written.
The build
Three bands · every one can be paid offOne job done properly: a single integration, a form that lands in the right system, a report that used to be assembled by hand, or a website for the trade.
- Timesheets or job cards straight into the ledger
- An enquiry pipeline that files itself
- One dashboard fed by what you already run
- A site like the four on the designs page
A system with a few moving parts that talk to each other. Roles, a mobile view, two or three integrations, and data brought across from wherever it lives now.
- Job and fleet board with the phone view
- Quote to cash, one record end to end
- Client portal on top of your existing jobs
- Payroll and leave pipeline into Xero or MYOB
The operating system for the business. Several modules, many users and roles, live data from vehicles or sites, and the migration of years of records.
- Dispatch, tracking, compliance and invoicing as one
- Multi-site or multi-entity operations
- Live telemetry and the reporting on top of it
- Replacing an enterprise platform outright
Bands are inclusive of scope, design, build, testing, deployment, documentation and the settling-in period. A fixed quote is given against a written scope; the band tells you which conversation to expect.
Where the money goes
The matrix · typical share by band| Line | Small | Medium | Large | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scoping and design | 15%A$1k to A$3k | 12%A$2.4k to A$9k | 10%A$7.5k and up | Time in the business, watching the week, writing a scope a business owner can read. The cheapest place to find out what was misunderstood. |
| Build | 45%A$3k to A$9k | 40%A$8k to A$30k | 35%A$26k and up | The screens, the rules, the database. Widely used technology that any competent developer can maintain in ten years. |
| Integrations | 10%A$0.7k to A$2k | 15%A$3k to A$11k | 18%A$13.5k and up | Xero, MYOB, the fleet trackers, the supplier portals. Each has its own interface, limits and quirks; the price is the work of learning and handling them. |
| Data migration | 5%A$0.3k to A$1k | 8%A$1.6k to A$6k | 12%A$9k and up | Years of jobs, customers and invoices moved across, reconciled to the cent. Bad data costs more to move than good data. |
| Testing and hardening | 10%A$0.7k to A$2k | 10%A$2k to A$7.5k | 10%A$7.5k and up | Known answers first. The awkward cases, the failure paths, the security pass, the load it will actually see. |
| Deployment and handover | 8%A$0.5k to A$1.6k | 7%A$1.4k to A$5k | 6%A$4.5k and up | Hosting in your name, your credentials, a written runbook a competent outsider could pick up. |
| Documentation and training | 4%A$0.3k to A$0.8k | 5%A$1k to A$3.8k | 5%A$3.8k and up | The crew shown the system on their own phones. Documentation written in plain English, kept next to the code. |
| Settling-in reserve | 3%A$0.2k to A$0.6k | 3%A$0.6k to A$2.3k | 4%A$3k and up | Defects surfacing in the weeks after ship are fixed inside the quote. This is the line that pays for it. |
Shares are typical, not a formula. A quote itemises them for your job.
What moves the price
Up or down · in order of effect- How many systems it must talk to. Every integration is a second product to understand and keep working.
- How many kinds of people use it. Roles, permissions and a phone view multiply the screens.
- How much history comes with it. Ten years of records cost more to move than ten weeks.
- Whether it works offline. A job card that must survive a black spot is a harder build than one that does not.
- Compliance on top. Fatigue rules, dangerous goods, award interpretation, audit trails.
- How settled your process is. A process that changes weekly is scoped twice. We will say so.
The stack you rent now
Fig A · pick a business or build your ownMost businesses run on a stack of subscriptions, each reasonable on its own, all priced by headcount and most rising each year. Tick what you pay for, set the crew, and put it next to one build you own. The ledger and the office suite stay either way; we integrate with them rather than replace them.
Blinco Hosted
We run it · billed monthly · cancel with a month's noticeOwn the system without running the servers. Blinco Hosted is the build running on infrastructure we manage, watched around the clock, with a person on the end of an incident and a change budget every month for the small things that come up. Priced by the same band as the build.
- Servers
- Managed hosting, storage and daily backups in Australia, in our name, restorable to you on request
- Uptime
- Monitored 24/7, 99.9% target, status reported monthly
- Incidents
- Acknowledged within 4 business hours, fixed same or next business day
- Updates
- Security patching and dependency updates, monthly
- Changes
- Up to 4 hours a month of small changes and questions
- Contact
- A named person, not a queue
- Servers
- Managed hosting with a standby, hourly backups, off-site copy, restore tested quarterly
- Uptime
- Monitored 24/7, 99.95% target, monthly report with numbers
- Incidents
- Acknowledged within 1 hour in business hours, 4 hours after hours; critical faults worked until fixed
- Updates
- Security patching within a week of release, dependency updates monthly, integration APIs tracked
- Changes
- Up to 12 hours a month of changes, new reports and small features
- Contact
- A named person with a backup, quarterly review of what to build next
- Servers
- Redundant hosting across two locations, continuous backups, restore drills, capacity planned ahead of you
- Uptime
- Monitored 24/7, 99.99% target, live status page
- Incidents
- Acknowledged within 30 minutes around the clock, critical faults worked until fixed, written post-mortem
- Updates
- Patching within days, staged releases, every integration watched for vendor changes
- Changes
- 30 hours a month and up, roadmap agreed each quarter
- Contact
- A named lead and a standing monthly meeting
Updates and maintenance
Twelve months covered · then it is a choiceSoftware changes. Xero changes its API, a fleet tracker renames a field, a supplier portal gets a new login. When we build something that talks to other programs, at some point it will need attention because one of those programs changed.
For twelve months after handover, that work is on us. If something outside the system changes and the system stops working because of it, we fix it. No charge.
After twelve months, keeping it working is one of two things. It is part of Blinco Hosted, where the retainer covers it. Or it is billed separately as the work comes up. We cannot maintain software indefinitely for free, and we would rather state that here than raise it later.
Anything we got wrong is a different matter. Broken, not as promised, or not what was wanted gets fixed as part of the job, whenever it turns up.
When the subscription wins
When we advise against a buildKeep the off-the-shelf subscription when the crew is small and the workflow is standard, when you are still discovering your process and should rent flexibility rather than commission permanence, and when the pain is one feature deep, where a small integration next to the platform beats replacing it. The calculator above will say so in plain numbers. The build case begins where those conditions end.
Where AI fits
Used for the task, not the systemWhere a model genuinely earns its place, reading a supplier invoice, drafting a reply for a person to approve, we use one for that task: the smallest model that does the job, called when needed, with results cached so the same work is not paid for twice. In a well-built system the cost is small, and it appears in your scope as a line item you can see rather than a dependency you cannot leave.