Custom HR software development, priced per project — not per employee per month.
PTO requests live in three inboxes. Onboarding is a printout nobody can find. Employee records sit in nine spreadsheets — and every November, open enrollment lands on a 400-row workbook with one broken formula. We build the one system that runs your people ops — records, time off, onboarding, timesheets, reviews — and it never charges you for hiring.
The rent is per employee. The minimums are aimed at you.
Four mainstream tools — records, reviews, hiring, time — priced from their own published sheets, August 2026. Read the bottom line of each column: the smaller the company, the more every employee costs to administer. Seat floors and annual minimums exist precisely so that being small doesn't come cheap.
Twelve months, twelve fires. The system knows the calendar.
People ops isn't a steady hum — it's a season schedule, and every deadline lands on whoever "does HR" between the duties of their actual job. Here's the year your system takes over.
Nine spreadsheets become one record.
Everything about one person, in one file, with rules: the employee sees their own; a manager sees the team; the owner sees everything, with an audit log. Modules arrive in the order yours hurt —
The ranking pages said it themselves.
Here's the sentence none of them will print: built for US companies with 10 to 200 employees. 98.1% of American employer firms have fewer than a hundred people — the enterprise shops' example customer is the exception, not you. You don't need a 6,000-seat platform or a compliance department to run one. You need the PTO requests out of the inbox, the I-9s where an auditor expects them, and a price with four figures on the front of it.
HR sends offer letters all day. Here's ours.
Every vendor in this market hides the number — behind a demo, a sales call, or a calculator quiz that ends in "our experts will contact you." And renting has its own fine print: one of the best-known small-business HR platforms simply stopped taking new customers last year, and its tenants inherited a migration project instead of a renewal.
Ours reads like the letters you send: terms first, in writing, before any work starts. The number starts at $7,500, it stays fixed, and the thing being hired ends up on your side of the table — repo, database, server, all titled to you.
NO DEMO GAUNTLET · NO CALCULATOR QUIZ · THE NUMBER COMES FIRST — GET THE LETTER FILLED IN →
What owners ask before they sign.
01 What does custom HR software development cost?
Systems sized for 10–200 employees land at $7,500–$22,000 here — fixed, phased, in writing within 24 hours. The companies ranking for this query publish $30,000–$50,000 for a "basic MVP" and $200,000–$500,000+ for a full build, when they publish anything. And honestly: if a single $250/mo tool covers you today, keep renting it. Custom wins when you're stacking three tools, paying minimums, or bending your process around someone else's workflow.
02 Do you build payroll too?
No — and be suspicious of anyone who says yes casually. US payroll means quarterly Form 941, annual 940, W-2s, and separate withholding and unemployment filings in every state you employ. That's a compliance business, not a software feature. Your system runs everything around payroll — hours, PTO, compensation records — and syncs it to Gusto, ADP or QuickBooks Payroll through their APIs (Gusto ships a dedicated embedded-payroll API for exactly this). Errors mostly start upstream anyway: EY counts 1 in 5 payrolls with mistakes, at $291 each.
03 We're on spreadsheets and half of BambooHR. What about our data?
It comes with you. Exports and CSVs import cleanly — balances, hire dates, comp history, review notes — and the new system runs alongside the old until the numbers match, then you switch. Nothing is ripped out on day one. If "the old system" is a 2011 Access database, that's literally our modernization specialty.
04 Employee data is the most sensitive thing we hold. Where does it live?
In your database, on your server — not pooled in a vendor's multi-tenant cloud. Access is role-based: an employee sees their own file, a manager their team, you everything, and every change lands in an audit log. Retention is built in, not remembered: FLSA wants payroll records for 3 years and time cards for 2, and I-9s have their own clock — the system keeps them without a banker's box.
05 Will a 30-person team actually use it?
There's nothing to install and nothing to learn: any phone, any browser. An employee's whole surface is their own file — request time off, sign the handbook, download the W-2 in January instead of emailing you. Approvals happen from the email itself. If your team can use a shared inbox, they can use this; the difference is this one answers back.
06 Who owns it — and who maintains it after you?
You own it from commit one: repo, database, and the server it runs on — a boring, mainstream stack (Go or PHP, PostgreSQL, plain HTML) hosted on your account for about $40 a month. Thirty days of post-launch fixes are in the contract; after that, keep us on retainer or hand it to any developer you hire. No license to renew, no seats to true up, no platform that can be "discontinued for new customers" out from under you.