Nobody asks this question casually. If you are searching for what a quoting system costs, you have already decided the spreadsheet is a problem. You are trying to work out whether fixing it is a five thousand dollar job or a fifty thousand dollar one, because those are different conversations with different people.
The honest answer is that the software is rarely what drives the number. Four other things do.
How much of the process nobody has written down
This is the big one, and it is the one nobody expects. Most quoting processes live in someone's head. There is a discount that gets applied when the client is a repeat customer, except when the job is under a certain size. There is a margin that moves depending on how busy the workshop is. There is a person who checks the numbers before anything goes out, and everyone knows to ask them, and nobody has written down what they check.
Building software means making all of that explicit. That is genuinely valuable, and it is often the first time a business sees its own process written down. It also takes time, and it happens before any code gets written. A build where the rules are already documented costs meaningfully less than one where we are discovering them in workshops.
What it has to talk to
A quoting tool that stands alone is a small build. A quoting tool that pulls customers from your CRM, prices from your inventory system, and pushes accepted quotes into your accounting software as invoices is a different project, and most of the extra work is in the connections rather than the tool.
Integrations are also where estimates go wrong, because the cost depends on the system at the other end. A modern API is straightforward. An older platform with no documented API, or one where the vendor charges for access, can cost more to connect to than the tool itself.
What happens to the old quotes
Every business says they do not need the history, and most of them change their mind once they realise they cannot look up what they charged a client two years ago. Migrating that data is usually not difficult, but it is never free, and it is worth deciding early rather than at the end.
Who has to use it
A tool used by two people who sit near each other can be blunt. A tool used by fifteen people across three sites, some of them on a phone at a job site, needs to handle permissions, offline behaviour and a fair bit of thinking about how people actually work. Same core function, considerably more build.
So what does it cost
[Your real range goes here. Something like: most quoting builds we do land between X and Y, with the simplest at the bottom of that and multi-site with integrations at the top.]
What we can say without knowing your business is that the range is wide for good reasons, and anyone who quotes you a firm number before understanding the four things above is guessing. We quote after a discovery call, once we know which of those apply to you.
When not to build one
Sometimes the answer is that you should not. If your quoting is slow because two people are arguing about pricing rules, software will not fix that, it will just make the argument permanent. If an off-the-shelf tool does eighty percent of what you need and the other twenty percent is preference rather than necessity, buy the tool.
The case for building is when the process is genuinely yours, when it is a real competitive advantage, or when the cost of the workaround has quietly grown past the cost of the fix. That last one is the most common, and the easiest to miss, because nobody adds up the hours.