Published 15 September 2026
Why the range is so wide
Because two projects described with the same three letters can differ by a factor of eight. ERP is not a product with a specification; it is a category that covers everything from a stock ledger with a login to a system running purchasing, production, sales, finance and payroll for four hundred people across three sites.
The number is driven almost entirely by one thing, and it is not the one people expect. It is not the number of screens. It is the number of rules the system has to enforce — who can approve what, at what value, in what sequence, with which exceptions. A screen is a day's work. A rule that has four exceptions, two of which nobody mentioned until testing, is a fortnight.
What each band typically buys
These are the bands we see most often for Indian mid-market projects. They assume a competent senior team, fixed-price phases, and that you own the code at the end.
- ₹5–12 lakh — one department done properly. Inventory, or order-to-invoice, or admissions and fees. Two or three user roles. Three to four months.
- ₹12–25 lakh — two or three connected departments, with reporting across them. Five or six roles, approval chains, integration into Tally or a payment gateway. Five to seven months.
- ₹25–40 lakh+ — an organisation-wide system. Most departments, multi-location stock, production or project costing, role-based reporting for management. Seven to twelve months, delivered in phases.
How it compares with licensing an off-the-shelf ERP
The honest comparison is over five years, not at purchase, and it has to include the parts that do not appear on the quotation.
A licensed ERP looks cheaper on day one and is billed per user per year forever. At fifty users on a mid-tier plan you are typically somewhere between ₹6 lakh and ₹15 lakh annually before implementation, and implementation for a serious deployment is rarely less than the first year's licence. Add the customisation needed to make it fit, which is usually billed by a partner at their day rate, and the recustomisation each time the vendor upgrades the platform.
A custom build is a larger one-time cost and then hosting and support — commonly ₹8,000 to ₹40,000 a month depending on scale — with no per-user component at all. The crossover point in most of the projects we have scoped sits somewhere between year two and year four. Below about twenty users, off-the-shelf almost always wins. Above about a hundred, custom almost always does. In between it depends on how badly the standard product fits.
What makes a quote go up
If you want to keep a project at the lower end of its band, these are the things that move it, roughly in order of impact.
- Integrations. Each external system — Tally, a bank, a payment gateway, a logistics provider, an existing HR system — is its own small project with its own failure modes.
- Data migration from something messy. Clean data moves cheaply. Fifteen years of a spreadsheet where the same supplier appears under six spellings does not.
- Approval hierarchies with exceptions. "The branch manager approves up to ₹50,000, except for these three categories, except at month-end" is three rules, not one.
- Offline working. A system that has to keep functioning without a connection and reconcile afterwards is meaningfully harder than one that does not.
- Anything involving statutory calculation. GST is routine; payroll statutory deductions are not, because they change and being wrong creates a compliance problem rather than a bug.
What we would ask before quoting
A number given without these answers is a guess dressed up as a quotation, and the gap gets recovered later as change requests. We would want to know: how many people will use it and in how many distinct roles; which departments are in scope for phase one; what it has to connect to; where your current data lives and what state it is in; and what specifically is going wrong today that made you start looking.
That last question matters more than the rest combined. The most expensive ERP projects are the ones commissioned because it felt like time, rather than to fix something identifiable.