The 5 Best Software Development Companies in Manchester

Day rates run £450 to £700 for a mid-level developer at a Manchester agency, £700 to £1,100 for senior or lead engineers, and higher again at holding-company firms. A discovery phase is typically £5,000 to £20,000 and is worth paying for separately. A usable first version of a straightforward internal tool is £40,000 to £100,000. A consumer mobile app on both platforms with a backend starts around £120,000 and routinely passes £300,000. Anyone quoting £15,000 for a two-platform app is quoting for a prototype, whatever the proposal says.

Fixed price transfers risk to the supplier, and they price that risk in, usually at 30% or more. It also makes every change a negotiation, which is corrosive on a project where the requirements will change, and they always do. Time and materials is cheaper and fairer but requires you to govern it, with a real product owner reviewing progress fortnightly. The workable middle is a fixed-price discovery producing a specification, then time and materials against a capped budget with a defined scope. Be suspicious of a fixed price offered before discovery.

Under UK law the developer owns copyright in commissioned software unless it is assigned in writing, which is the opposite of what most clients assume. You want a full assignment of intellectual property on payment, the source code in a repository you control, documentation and deployment access. Watch for third-party licences and any proprietary framework the agency reuses across clients, which you may only be licensed to use rather than own. Ask the direct question: if we part ways tomorrow, can another team run this?

An agency is right for a defined project, for getting to market before you know whether the product works, and for specialist skills you need once. In-house is right once the software is the business, because the knowledge compounds and the cost per engineer is lower. The expensive middle is a long-running agency retainer on a core product, where you pay agency rates indefinitely for a system nobody in your company understands. Plan the handover from the start, and budget for a technical person on your side.

That the firm has an audited information security management system and has been assessed against it by a certification body. It matters if you are handing over personal data, health data or anything a regulator cares about, and it is frequently a procurement requirement in the public sector. What it is not is a statement about code quality. A certified firm can write bad software securely. Ask for the certificate and the scope statement, because certification sometimes covers only part of an organisation.

Assign one empowered product owner on your side who can make decisions in a day. Insist on working software every two weeks rather than status reports. Get access to the repository from day one, not at handover. Agree what "done" means, including tests, documentation and deployment, before the first sprint. And keep the first release small enough to actually ship, because the projects that fail are almost never the ones that shipped something modest early.