The dominant factor is rarely the technology stack — it is uncertainty. Every open question in the requirements becomes padding inside the number you receive. A supplier that does not know the exceptions and edge cases must assume the worst. Investing a few days in requirements work frequently cuts the total far more than any rate negotiation.
Integrations are the next major multiplier. A screen that writes to your own database is easy to estimate; the same screen wired into a legacy ERP is not. The cost sits in the counterparty: poor documentation, slow approval cycles, fields that mean something different on each side. Ask each bidder to break integrations out as separate items, software development for healthcare as this is where estimates break.
The requirements nobody writes down silently change the number. An internal tool used by a small internal team is a very different build vs buy software from the same feature set handling public traffic. Security reviews, availability guarantees, scalability, audit logging and localisation all add measurable effort. State them early or expect them to arrive later as change requests.
The team you are quoted matters a great deal. A rate card tells you almost nothing on its own: one senior developer at twice the price can be less expensive in the end than two juniors who need supervision and rework. Check too what else appears on the invoice: coordination, quality assurance, infrastructure work and analysis have to be done by someone, but these should be visible in the estimate.
The quoted figure is never the full cost of ownership. Expect infrastructure, paid APIs, monitoring and a maintenance allowance annually. A common working assumption is that any production system consumes a recurring percentage of its original build cost per year in fixes, updates and small changes. Ignoring this is the most frequent planning error.
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