Solva Systems › Pricing
Pricing depends on the problem, not the product.
Solva works with small and medium-sized companies that need software shaped around how they actually work: internal tools, document handling, finance admin, customer portals, AI review queues, reporting, stock, approvals, job operations, or the awkward process no off-the-shelf tool understands.
From £595 per month
For a system built on our platform, hosted, supported and improved, for a company of five to twenty people. Work that does not fit the platform is a genuine build and starts at £1,950. Pay nothing up front and take an initial term, or pay for the build up front and there is no term at all.
The engine is already built and hardened. For a construction, fleet, field service or trade company, most of the work is fitting it to how you actually run rather than starting from nothing, and the price reflects that. What moves it is how far your work sits from what the platform already does, never how many people log in.
How pricing works
Step one
Free
first conversation
Show us how the company works now, where the pain is, and what you wish the system would handle. We will tell you whether bespoke software sounds worthwhile, or whether an existing tool is the better answer.
Step two
Free
a wireframe of yours
If the conversation makes sense, we build a wireframe of your system before you agree to anything. It is deliberately basic and most of it does not really do the work yet: enough screens, in your words, to see what you would be paying for.
Step three
Monthly
real system
Once you agree, we turn the wireframe into the real thing: PostgreSQL database, proper scheduling, backups, archiving, hosting, monitoring, support and ordinary improvements.
Why the first version is free
You should not have to buy a bespoke system from a description. After the first conversation, if there is a real problem worth solving, we make the idea visible. The first version is there to prove the shape: screens, language, workflow, roles, decisions and the information the company needs to see.
It is worth being blunt about what it is not. It is an extremely basic version of what you would end up with. It runs on fixed demo data rather than a real database, so plenty of it will not actually work, and it is meant to be looked at rather than used. What it does show you is the thing nobody else lets you see before you pay: your company, in your words, in software.
That keeps the early work fast and low-risk. If it is wrong, we can change it quickly. If it is right, we already know what needs to become real: the database, user accounts, scheduling, backups, archiving, security, imports, exports and the pieces that have to keep working every day.
What it costs
Working ranges, before VAT. Most of our work is for companies of five to twenty people. These are not packages you squeeze into; they are a way to see how far your work sits from what the platform already does.
Built on the platform
£595-£1,200
per month
Construction, fleet, field service and the trades, typically five to twenty people. The engine exists, so you are paying to have it fitted to how you run, then hosted, supported and kept working.
A new shape
£1,950+
per month
When the work does not resemble anything we have built. A different data model is a real build rather than a fitting, and it is priced as one.
- New features after go-live are quoted, not free. Anything broken, and anything awkward to use, is fixed at no cost, because that is the job rather than a change request. A feature the system was never built to do is £650 a day, estimated and agreed before anything starts.
Examples
The point is not the industry. It is the work the system has to absorb.
| Company problem | Likely shape | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Six-person groundworks firm running the diary, jobs and invoices off paper | Built on the platform | £595/month |
| Fifteen-person contractor with vans, certificates, timesheets and a customer portal | Built on the platform | £850-£1,200/month |
| Recruitment firm with candidate intake, client pipeline and compliance documents | A new shape | £1,950+/month |
| Business receiving PDFs and forms that need AI extraction and human approval | A new shape, AI heavy | £2,500+/month |
What moves the price
- How much the system must replace. One approval workflow is different from running sales, operations, documents and finance admin together.
- How many exceptions there are. The awkward five percent often takes more design than the obvious ninety-five.
- How much AI is involved. Reading documents is one thing. Extracting facts, checking confidence, routing exceptions and keeping an audit trail is another.
- How many systems it must connect to. Accounting, email, CRMs, calendars, file stores, payment tools and legacy databases all change the build.
- How critical it is. A reporting tool can be down for an hour. A system your company works from all day needs stronger monitoring, backups and support.
- How fast it needs to change. Some companies need a stable system. Others need ongoing experiments, automations and new workflows every month.
What the monthly includes
If we are running the system for you, the monthly is not just rent for software. It is the team that keeps the thing useful.
The one thing it does not cover is AI usage. Most of what looks like AI in a Solva system is ordinary logic and costs nothing to run, but where a real model is plugged in, reading documents or drafting replies, it costs money every time it runs. You pay for that at cost, with nothing added on top, against a ceiling agreed before it is switched on.
What we build
Almost anything that makes a company run better, provided it has a real operational job to do. A Solva system might manage jobs and field teams, but it might just as easily read documents through AI, route exceptions to staff, prepare customer replies, reconcile records, control approvals, produce reports, or give customers a portal into work that used to happen by email.
We are not trying to sell you fleet tracking if your problem is supplier paperwork. We are not trying to sell you job management if your problem is document review. The work decides the system.
Contract and ownership
There are two ways to pay for this, and you pick the one that suits your cash rather than ours.
Nothing up front. We build the whole system before you have paid for any of it, so the cost of the build is recovered across an initial term agreed before we start, usually 24 to 48 months. The longer the build and the more we put in before launch, the longer the term needs to be. After it you are month to month and can stop whenever you like.
Or pay for the build up front, and there is no fixed term at all. The term only exists to recover a build we funded. Fund it yourself and it has no reason to be there, so you are on a rolling monthly from the first day and can leave whenever you want.
Your business data is yours. The system is built for your company to use. Ownership of the underlying software and IP is separate, because the managed monthly model includes us hosting, maintaining and improving it.
When a simple build still makes sense
Simple does not mean unsuitable. A small system can be exactly the right answer if it removes a real bottleneck, protects a margin, saves hours every week, or gives the company a way of working that ordinary software cannot.
The line is this: if an existing tool already does the job well, we will say so. If the job is easy to describe but awkward to solve inside off-the-shelf software, that can be a perfect Solva build. Bespoke work is about fit, not size.
Want a price that matches the thing your company actually needs?
Book a conversation