Software Development Cost Calculator

It splits the job in two. An AI model reads your description and breaks it into structured effort — which components exist, which roles are needed, and how many elapsed weeks each one takes. That effort is then priced in code, using Ryware's published rates. The model never sees a rate and never produces a figure.

That division matters more than it might sound. A language model asked directly for a price will produce a confident-looking number drawn from whatever it absorbed during training. Here, the money is arithmetic: the same effort breakdown always produces the same figures, every number traces back to a published rate, and changing our rates updates every estimate at once.

What the split does not remove is the model's own judgement. Two runs of the same description can read it slightly differently — a week more design here, a week less QA there — so re-running may move the estimate by a few percent. We use greedy decoding to keep that drift small, but an estimate produced from a paragraph is inherently a reading of that paragraph, not a measurement of it. That is also why the output is a range.

• Name the integrations. "Integrates with our ERP" and "integrates with Priority via its REST API, which we already use" are different projects.

• Say who uses it and how many of them. Ten internal users and ten thousand public ones imply different architectures at the same feature list.

• State what already exists. An estimate for a greenfield build is very different from one that has to live alongside a system you cannot change.

• Mention hard constraints — a regulatory requirement, a fixed launch date, a platform you must stay on. These usually cost more than features do.

What this tool cannot see is also worth naming: your existing codebase, your team's familiarity with the domain, your procurement process, and whether the requirements will hold still. Those move real project costs more than anything you can type into a form.