Why charge by hours?
Every time a new customer reaches out, there's one question that's always the same: what's the budget? And honestly, if I were in their shoes, I'd want to know too.
But this is a question I've never been able to answer directly. Quoting an ERPNext implementation without knowing the scope - without understanding what the business actually needs - is like quoting a house construction cost without a building plan.
We need to ask first: how does the customer want to live in this house? How many square meters? How many floors? How many bathrooms? What flooring materials?
An ERPNext implementation is the same. What modules are in scope? Does the customer need HR, CRM, Manufacturing?
The problem with module-based pricing
Many ERPNext vendors quote by modules. You get a list like this:
Stock Module
- Selling Module Setup
- Data Import
- Customer Data Import
- Customer Group Data Import
- Selling Process Support
- Standard Selling Process
Other (non-open-source) software vendors price the same way, but they also add a software license fee on top.
Here's the thing - does "Standard Selling Process" in that list actually match how your business works? If it doesn't, any change becomes a change request, and change requests cost extra. If your data needs cleansing before import, that's another charge. If you need a customization, that's another charge on top.
Paying for an ERPNext implementation by modules is like buying a pre-made house plan and then building it. If your business happens to fit that plan exactly, great - but that's unlikely. Every deviation becomes a change request, and every change request is an added cost.
A project quoted at 500,000 THB can easily end up at 1,000,000 THB by the time you're done.
There's another hidden problem: module-based quotes often bundle in features you don't need. You might get charged for "Inventory with serial number and batch tracking" when your business doesn't use serial numbers at all. You're paying for complexity you'll never use.
How hourly pricing works differently
We charge by the hour. Before writing a single line of code, we sit down with you and ask: what is the most painful problem you want to solve right now?
We start there. We tackle that problem first, deploy it, collect your feedback, and loop back. This keeps the project grounded in what actually matters to your business - not a pre-packaged module list someone else designed.
The bigger advantage is that hourly pricing creates room for real trade-off conversations. Say you want a feature that would take 10 hours to build exactly as you imagined. We can have an honest conversation: "If we change this one part, we can get it done in 4 hours instead." You get to decide whether that part is worth the extra 6 hours of cost. That decision should be yours to make - not buried in a flat module price.
This kind of transparency is what we think an implementation partner owes you.