Choosing a UK software development company

How firms differ by size and price, the ten-minute checks, and the questions that expose a bad fit early.

Updated 19 September 2026 · 8 min read

The short answer

Pick by size band first, because that decides price, process and who you actually speak to. A defined build handled by a small studio and the same build handled by a mid-size agency differ by a factor of three or four.

Then run the two checks that take ten minutes: Companies House, and a reference you choose rather than one they offer.

Most advice on this subject is a list of adjectives. What follows is the structure of the UK market, what each kind of firm is good and bad at, and the specific checks that catch the problems people write about afterwards.

The four kinds of supplier, and what each costs

Type	Size	Typical project	Right for	Wrong for
Freelancer	1	£2,000 to £20,000	A small defined piece where you can carry the risk of one person being unavailable.	Anything the business depends on, because there is no cover and no continuity.
Small studio	2 to 15	£15,000 to £80,000	Defined projects where you want one accountable contact who knows the whole job.	Programmes needing several teams working at once.
Mid-size agency	30 to 200	£60,000 to £400,000	Multi-team projects needing design, development and project management under one roof.	Small focused builds, where the overhead of their process costs more than the work.
Offshore team	Varies	Lowest headline rate	Well-specified work where you have your own technical person to manage it.	Discovery-led work, because the cost of misunderstanding lands on you.

We sit in the small studio band, and the bands either side of it are real alternatives.

The single commonest expensive mistake is band mismatch: taking a £30,000 project to a firm whose process was built for £300,000 projects. You pay for project managers, account managers and a discovery phase sized for something four times larger, and the work itself is the same work.

Two checks that take ten minutes

Companies House. Free, and it takes two minutes. Look at the incorporation date, whether accounts are filed on time, and whether the directors match the people you have been speaking to. A firm claiming ten years of work from a company incorporated last spring is worth a question. So is a supplier with no UK entity at all when you have been told they are British.
A reference you choose. Ask for one, name the project you want to hear about, and ideally pick a client whose job went wrong somewhere. Every project has a difficult month. How a supplier handled theirs tells you more than a polished case study, and a supplier who will only offer pre-selected references has told you something already.

Eight questions that expose a bad fit early

Who owns the finished system, everything needed to run and change it, and the logins? If the answer involves continuing to pay them to hold it, that is a licence rather than a build. Here is what happens when nobody asked.
What exactly is in the written scope, and what happens to anything outside it? A fixed price with no written scope is not a fixed price.
If it runs over because you underestimated, who pays? The answer should be that they absorb their own estimating errors.
What have you assumed about our data, and have you asked to see it? A supplier who prices a migration without looking has priced a guess.
Who is my point of contact, and do they know the whole job? The answer should be one named person who stays with the project from the first call to handover. At larger firms, also ask what happens when your project is not the biggest one in the building.
What does support cost afterwards, and is it optional? A build that only works while you pay their retainer is a subscription in disguise.
What would make you tell us not to do this? A supplier with no answer has never turned work down, which tells you how the advice is calibrated.
Which off-the-shelf products did you consider first? If they considered none, they were never comparing.

Why these projects fail, and what prevents it

Standish CHAOS research has found more than a third of large custom software initiatives abandoned outright and under a third delivered successfully. The causes cluster, and most of them are visible before the build starts.

Scope written from a brief rather than from the work. Software built from a meeting room description gets rejected by the people who do the job, because the description left out the workarounds.
No named decision-maker on your side. Projects with a committee approving each screen take twice as long and arrive as a compromise nobody wanted.
Big-bang cutover. Replacing everything on a Monday is how these projects make the news. Old and new running in parallel costs more and removes most of the risk.
Discovery cut to win the price. It is 10 to 15 per cent of budget and it is the part that decides whether the rest is spent on the right thing.
Nobody owning it after launch. A system with no owner drifts out of use within a year regardless of how good it was on day one.

Where we fit, and where we do not

We sit in the small studio band. Projects start at £10,000 and most land between £15,000 and £55,000. That makes us a reasonable fit for a defined build where you want one project manager from the first call to handover, and the bands are published in full. The work we have done is the fairest way to judge us.

It makes us the wrong choice if you need several teams working in parallel, or a name your board already recognises. Those are real reasons to choose a larger firm and we would rather say so here than in a second meeting.

Common questions

How do I check a UK software company is genuine?

Companies House, free and about two minutes. Check the incorporation date against any claim about how long they have been trading, whether accounts are filed on time, and whether the listed directors are the people you have been speaking to. Then ask for a reference you choose rather than one they offer.

Should I use a freelancer, a small studio or an agency?

It follows the project. A freelancer suits a small defined piece where you can absorb the risk of one person being unavailable. A small studio suits defined builds from about £15,000 to £80,000. A mid-size agency suits multi-team work above roughly £60,000. Taking a small project to a large agency is the commonest expensive mistake.

What should be in the contract?

A written scope describing exactly what exists at the end, the fixed price against that scope, what happens to work outside it, a payment schedule tied to delivered functionality rather than dates, and an explicit handover on completion of everything needed to run and change the system: its source code (what another developer would need to change it), the documentation and the logins.

Is offshore development a bad idea?

No, but it changes where the risk sits. It works when the specification is genuinely complete and you have somebody technical to manage it. It goes wrong on discovery-led work, because the cost of a misunderstanding lands on you rather than on the supplier, and time zones make that expensive to correct.

How much should discovery cost?

Typically 10 to 15 per cent of the project budget, whether it is billed on its own or folded into the price of the build. What it produces matters more than how it is charged. You want a written document based on watching the work rather than on a brief, and you want to keep it whether or not you go ahead. Discovery that ends in nothing but a proposal was written to win the work.

What is the biggest warning sign?

A supplier who has never told a prospective client not to build something. It means their advice has only ever pointed one way, and you have no way of telling whether this recommendation is different.

Tell us what is not working

Describe the process that is costing you time. If software is the wrong answer we will say so, and if a product already covers it we will name the product.

From £10,000Most projects land between £15,000 and £55,000.

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