Fees

1. Operational Core Partnership Contribution Fee

Your custom software developed by us is based on our open source “Operational Core” platform. Our Operational Core Partnership Contribution fee covers Operational Core platform development, management, and patching.

This fee is scaled on monthly active users (MAU) to account for increasing requirements and demand for features with increasing MAU.
Base fee: £300/month

Note: if your organisation requires the accelerated delivery of an Operational Core feature, we may request a supplement to your Operational Core Partnership Contribution according to the custom development fees outlined below.

2. Custom Development Fees

Our Custom Development Fees are charged per hour for development of new (and changes to existing) bespoke features, integrations and process automations.

Development is carried out on a per ticket basis by a team of developers with mixed skill-levels. The billable rate per person is set according to their experience. The composition of skill-level on any given ticket is dependent on the complexity of the ticket.

To simplify invoicing, we use a blended hourly rate of:

£84 per hour

Behind this blended hourly rate, we set each developer’s billable rate using the following as a guide:

Custom Development Fees are not charged for bug fixes on existing features; these are covered by your Custom Code Maintenance Retainer (see below).

3. Custom Code Maintenance Retainer Fee

We keep your private, customised version (fork) of Operational Core secure, stable, and aligned with the latest core updates. The work required to maintain your custom fork is proportional to how much your fork differs from Operational Core.

To calculate our Custom Code Maintenance Retainer, we rely on the version control software, “Git”. We use Git to calculate the number of lines of code that have been added or subtracted by us to get from Operational Core to the codebase which is your fork (this is known, in software engineering, as a “diff”).

This fee is charged at £7 / 1,000 Diff Lines / Month.

4. Managed Hosting Fee

We provide fully managed hosting for your customised fork of Operational Core. We also leverage our deployment infrastructure to ensure continuous integration and continuous deployment of features (CI/CD).

As part of our managed hosting, we take application database backups every 15 minutes and store these for one month.

Application Hosting

Your software is hosted on dedicated Debian-based virtual servers in London, UK. Our fee includes hosting, monitoring, updates, backups, and SSL management.

Your server spec requirement will be dependent on the computational needs of your bespoke code, and the number of concurrent requests (usually proportional to number of application users).

File Storage

Secure, scalable storage for images, documents, uploads and database backups in London, UK. We leverage Object Storage provided by our chosen cloud provider which guarantees data redundancy mitigating risk of data loss.

Managed VPN

If your customised Operational Core, requires access to an on-premise system such as an ERP software, we recommend a VPN tunnel for security purposes, which is installed and managed on the application hosting server by us at a cost of £50/month.

5. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Fee

We recommend our SLA so that we can be on hand to respond to issues and queries. Our SLA includes 24/7 coverage as standard, with a £60 supplement for each request made outside of our office hours (8am – 6pm UK time):

• Response time: Within 4 hours of receiving a support request.
• Issue resolution: Within 48 hours, though most are resolved significantly faster.
• Critical issues: Service outages or major incidents are prioritised immediately.

If you do not opt for our SLA, we can support any issues and queries at a rate of £120/hour.

6. Consultancy & Site Visit Fees

We offer consultancy to cover project planning, discovery, process analysis, and workshops. All consultancy is done remotely as standard, with on-site offered at our discretion. Our consultancy rate is £120/hour.

Example 1 – Monthly Fees

Small Manufacturer / Early Adopter

• A small manufacturer or larger company at early stage of adoption
• 10 monthly active users
• 2 bespoke medium-sized modules (circa 8 bespoke pages and custom data)
• No integration to on-premise system

A total of £187/month represents the cost to maintain and support the custom system, which also brings all the existing functionality and modules of Operational Core. A small contribution of £75 is made to support the development of the open-source Operational Core platform. Custom development charges and consultancy on new work is not included in this example.

The total monthly cost equates to £19.10/user/month

Example 2 – Monthly Fees

Mid-sized manufacturer with widespread adoption of custom software

• A mid-sized manufacturer who uses their custom fork throughout multiple departments
• 120 monthly active users
• 14 bespoke modules of varying sizes
• Integration with on-premise ERP system database

A total of £1967/month represents the cost to maintain and support the custom system, which also brings all the existing functionality and modules of Operational Core. A proportional contribution of £1200 is made to support the development of the open-source Operational Core platform which is likely to be leveraged in its completeness by the 14 custom modules. Custom development charges and consultancy on new work is not included in this example.

The total monthly cost equates to £16.63/user/month

Example 3 – Custom Development

Development and support of a medium-sized custom module

A company has a need to capture quality control information by following a specific workflow, once for each works order. They require:

• A custom data structure to store their custom quality control information
• A page with a custom form to capture the quality control information. The form is laid out to align with their workflow
• A page to view the quality control information. Where the user can also add images or leave comments in a comments thread
• A main page for the module listing all historic quality control information with several custom filters and ability to multi-level sort on multiple columns.

Thanks to the existing infrastructure in Operational Core, support for addition of images, comments, and multi-level sorting comes directly from existing modules and packages, saving development time.

The module requires an initial 1 hour of senior developer time, 5 hours of mid-level developer time and 24 hours of junior developer time.

Development Effort Breakdown

Custom Development Fee: £1,620

In the creation of module, our developers write 1,800 lines of custom code, not included in Operational Core, representing a diff of 1,800 lines.

At a cost of £7/1000 Diff Lines/Month, the Custom Code Maintenance Retainer charged for this custom module is £14/Month.