Most 25-person businesses do not decide to spend ₹8.7L a year on software. They decide to spend ₹2,000 a month, six times, over four years. This post adds it up.
The five subscriptions
A typical services or trading business in India ends up with something like this. The prices are category list prices at mid tiers as published in August 2026, not any one vendor's quote. Your invoices will differ, and the point is the shape, not the last rupee.
| Tool | Typical plan | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| CRM | 15 seats × ₹1,000–2,000 per user per month | ₹1.8L – 3.6L |
| HRMS and payroll | 25 employees × ₹80–150 per employee per month, plus base fee | ₹40k – 90k |
| GST billing and inventory | multi-user plan | ₹10k – 30k |
| Customer app on a no-code builder | business plan, published to both stores | ₹60k – 2.4L |
| Website builder and hosting | business plan plus domain | ₹8k – 30k |
| Automation glue between the tools | tasks-per-month plan | ₹24k – 1.2L |
| Subscriptions | ₹3.2L – 8.7L a year | |
| Implementation partner | one-time setup, data migration, training | ₹50k – 2L |
| Three years | ₹10.2L – 28.1L |
Two things hide inside that table. First, per-user pricing means the bill grows with the team, so year three is more expensive than year one for a business that is doing well. Second, the sixth line exists because the first five do not talk to each other. A lead in the CRM, a salary in the HRMS and an invoice in the billing tool are three records of the same customer, and the automation plan is what you pay to keep them roughly in sync.
The same four layers, built once
Samastack's bands for typical scope are a back office between ₹2L and ₹6L, a customer app between ₹1.5L and ₹4L, and a website between ₹40k and ₹1.2L. Built together on one engine they come out about 15% lower, which is ₹3.3L to ₹9.5L for all three. That is a one-time number. After handover you own the code, the repository, the hosting account and the domain.
| Item | Basis | Three years |
|---|---|---|
| Back office + customer app + website | built together, fixed quote after one call | ₹3.3L – 9.5L |
| Hosting | ₹15k – 40k a year, in your own account | ₹45k – 1.2L |
| Changes | a realistic ₹30k – 80k a year, quoted per change, no retainer | ₹90k – 2.4L |
| Three years | ₹4.7L – 13.1L |
The ranges overlap at the edges: a lean subscription setup on entry tiers can cost less over three years than a heavily customised build. In the middle of both ranges, about ₹19.1L against about ₹8.9L, the owned stack costs roughly half, and the gap widens in year four, when the subscriptions keep going and the build is already paid for.
What the money does not show
The automation line is the honest tell. It is the cost of having five data models for one business. On one engine, a customer is one record: the lead, the order, the invoice, the support ticket and the app login all point at it. Nobody exports a spreadsheet on Friday to reconcile the CRM with billing, because there is nothing to reconcile.
The other thing the table cannot show is that the subscription numbers are a floor. Seat counts go up. The plan you started on stops including the report you need. A tool gets acquired and its pricing changes. An owned system has none of those events in its future.
When the subscriptions are the right answer
Fewer than eight people, no customer-facing app, and a business that changes its process every quarter: buy the subscriptions. A build makes sense once the team is stable enough that the process is worth encoding, and the customer base is large enough that an app or portal saves real hours. The scope builder shows the band for your combination in a minute; the numbers above are the same ones it uses.
Your numbers
Pick your layers, see the band.
The scope builder uses the same bands as this post and shows a timeline and price for your combination in a minute.