Cost guide
What a blockchain build actually costs
This guide publishes scope tiers and timelines rather than numbers, because the honest answer turns on how much has to live on-chain and who needs to verify it without trusting you.
Get a scoped estimateWhy two quotes for the same brief look nothing alike
The phrase covers a token contract that ships in a fortnight and a permissioned network several organisations have to agree to run. In most builds the contract itself is a small share of the work. The budget goes on the indexing backend, the wallet flows, the admin panel and the audit.
One question moves the answer more than the rest: does real user value move through the contract? If it does, a third-party audit, an upgrade pattern and an incident plan stop being optional, and the schedule gains an audit-and-fix cycle. If it does not, a surprising number of projects collapse into an anchoring layer over the database you already run.
Cost drivers
What actually moves the number
The contracts are rarely the expensive part. Most of a blockchain budget goes on ordinary software around them, plus the security work that only applies once real value is at stake.
How much lives on-chain
Anchoring a hash of each record while the data stays in Postgres is a fraction of the work of moving the records themselves.
Real value in the contract
A staking or escrow contract needs a third-party audit, a timelock on admin functions and a rehearsed incident path. A loyalty-points contract needs none of that.
Contract complexity
A fixed-supply ERC-20 is close to boilerplate. A vesting schedule with cliff dates, clawback and a commission tree is genuine custom maths.
The upgrade decision
A proxy pattern designed in from the start costs little. Retrofitting one after launch means redeploying the contract and migrating every holder's balance.
Wallet and signing UX
MetaMask, WalletConnect and an embedded wallet for people who have never held a private key are separate flows, each with its own failure states.
The indexing backend
A node is too slow to serve a list view, so events are indexed into an ordinary database that must reconcile itself after a chain reorganisation.
Chain and node operations
A permissioned network charges no transaction fee, but somebody rotates certificates, watches validator uptime and restores a node from backup when it fails overnight.
Compliance and identity
KYC before a wallet may transact, sanctions screening on counterparties, and an export of every transfer a regulator can read are all integration work.
Admin and support tooling
Operations need to pause the contract, refund a stuck transfer and answer where-are-my-tokens tickets without waiting for a developer to run a script.
Scope tiers
Four honest sizes of blockchain project
Every project is scoped and quoted to its own requirements and budget, so what follows is what sits inside each tier, how long it takes, and what each one deliberately leaves out.
- TIER 1 — TOKEN AND LANDING PAGE
- A standards-compliant token, live on mainnet. Ships in 3-5 weeks
- ₹1.5L – ₹2.5L$1.7k – $2.8k
- Includes an ERC-20, BEP-20 or SPL contract with supply controls and access roles, testnet and mainnet deployment, explorer verification, and a wallet-connect page. Suits community and utility tokens. No third-party audit, no staking, vesting or app.
- TIER 2 — ANCHORING LAYER
- A tamper-evident audit trail on software you already run. Ships in 5-8 weeks
- ₹4L – ₹6L$4.5k – $6.8k
- Includes hashes of your critical records written on-chain, a verification page a customer or auditor can check themselves, and a write queue that survives an outage. Suits teams who need provable records. No token, no end-user wallets.
- TIER 3 — PRODUCTION DAPP WITH AUDIT
- Audited contracts, web dApp and indexing backend. Ships in 10-14 weeks, plus 2-4 weeks of audit
- ₹10L – ₹16L$11k – $18k
- Includes custom contract logic, third-party audit and the fix cycle, wallet integration, event indexing, an admin dashboard and launch support on one or two chains. Suits products moving real funds. No mobile app, no ERP integration.
- TIER 4 — ENTERPRISE OR MULTI-PARTY PLATFORM
- A permissioned network wired into enterprise systems. Ships in 6-12 months
- From ₹40LFrom $45k
- Includes permissioned chain or multi-chain deployment, role-based access, ERP or core-banking integration, compliance exports, mobile apps and monitoring. Suits several organisations sharing one record. Governance between those parties is the long pole, and negotiating it is not our work.
Indicative ranges for scoping conversations, not quotes. They reflect what work of this shape has cost us to deliver — your figure comes out of a paid discovery, against a written scope, and is fixed before any code is written. Gas, licences, cloud and third-party audit fees sit outside these numbers.
How we work
From a use case to something live
Timelines below are typical for a first blockchain build. Most of the saving happens in the first two steps, before anyone has committed to an architecture.
Use-case audit
1 weekWe work out which records genuinely need independent verification. Most scopes shrink here, and some projects end here, which is the cheapest possible place for that to happen.
Architecture and scope doc
1-2 weeksChain options, fully on-chain versus anchored, the upgrade pattern and the audit scope, written down with exclusions so nobody discovers in week ten that the admin panel was never included.
Build and audit
4-14 weeksContracts, indexing backend, dApp and admin tooling, with the audit booked early because good auditors have queues and the fix cycle after a report takes weeks of its own.
Launch and run
OngoingEvent monitoring, node uptime, a rehearsed path for a stuck or exploited contract, and the reconciliation job that catches the event your indexer quietly missed.
Is blockchain worth budgeting for now?
Worth reading before you brief a build. A good share of the projects we scope are better served by a smaller change to software the client already runs.
Worth budgeting for now if…
- Two or more organisations must trust the same shared record
- Someone outside your company has to verify data without asking you
- Real funds or regulated assets move without a middleman holding them
- The token or payout logic is the product, not a feature
Wait, if…
- One company owns the data and everyone already trusts it
- The goal is to say the product uses blockchain
- No counsel yet on whether your token is a security
- Nobody has agreed who runs the nodes or pays for them
Frequently Asked
Questions
Common questions about scoping blockchain work, audits, and what it takes to run afterwards.
Four things, roughly in order. Whether real funds move through the contract, because that forces a third-party audit and a fix cycle before launch. Custom contract logic such as vesting cliffs or a commission tree, which is real maths rather than a standard token. Compliance, where KYC before a wallet can transact means an identity vendor and a regulator-ready export. And the number of systems the chain has to talk to. Chain choice matters as well, though it moves running cost far more than build cost.
Start with the parts users never see. One chain instead of two. A web dApp instead of a mobile app with an embedded wallet. Anchoring hashes of your records rather than putting the records themselves on-chain. An admin panel with a handful of screens rather than a full operations console. Do not cut the audit if funds move, and do not cut the upgrade pattern, because retrofitting a proxy after launch means redeploying the contract and migrating every balance.
The indexing backend, first. Reading a list view straight from a node is too slow, so events get indexed into an ordinary database, and that database has to reconcile itself after a chain reorganisation. Then wallet support and account recovery, because users lose keys and write to you about it. Then legal review of the token itself, which we do not provide and you will need. Then operations: somebody must pause the contract, refund a stuck transfer, and answer tickets about missing tokens.
Four buckets, none of them a surprise once you name them. Transaction fees, which vary enormously by chain and can spike on a congested public mainnet. Node and RPC infrastructure, or validator hosting if you run a permissioned network. Monitoring and incident response, because a contract exploit is a live emergency rather than a ticket in a queue. And maintenance on the ordinary software around the contract. Chain choice is the biggest lever, and it should be decided on expected volume.
Phase it, in almost every case. Ship one contract doing one thing with a small dApp around it, get it audited, and put it in front of real users before the roadmap grows a marketplace. Blockchain punishes big-bang launches harder than normal software does, because a deployed contract is difficult to change and very public when it fails. The exception is a permissioned network shared by several organisations, where the governance agreement has to cover the whole design before anyone builds.
Have a project in mind?
Fixed price after a paid discovery — no hourly billing. A real engineer reads every enquiry, and we reply within 24 hours.