What a civic platform actually costs

Why nobody publishes these prices

If you are a councillor or a municipal officer looking for what an app for your council costs, you will not find a number. You will find contact forms. There are two reasons and neither helps you. The first is that many suppliers price to what they think you can pay, and publishing a figure removes that margin. The second is that a poorly defined project can cost anything, so without definition nobody wants to commit.

The result is that small councils budget blind. They ask for three quotes that differ by an order of magnitude, have no way to judge which is reasonable, and often end up buying a portal nobody opens. This note is an attempt to fix that from the other side.

What a civic platform is made of

When a council says “we want an app”, what it usually wants is for municipal information to stop being scattered across five places. That is the real problem and it is what sets the cost. A typical civic platform has five parts:

• Data aggregation. Transport, incident reports, events, air quality, alerts. Each source has its own format, its own refresh rhythm and its own outages.
• A channel back. A resident opening an incident from their phone and being able to follow it. This is what turns a portal into a platform.
• An admin panel. So municipal staff can manage content without calling the supplier for every change.
• Distribution. Web, and usually native iOS and Android apps published under the council’s own accounts.
• Operation. Monitoring, backups, updates and keeping pace with each iOS and Android release. This never ends.

The first part is the one most underestimated when quoting. Twenty-five data sources do not cost twenty-five times what one costs: each arrives in its own format, changes without warning and fails in its own way, and what sets the price is not connecting them once but keeping them running for years. It is the line item that most separates a realistic quote from an optimistic one.

The numbers

These are our published starting prices. The complex row is our own estimate, and we mark it as such:

The €14,900 figure is not arbitrary, and the detail matters. In Spain, the direct-award threshold for services lets an administration contract directly, without a tender, below that amount. For a small council that can be the difference between having the platform this year or in two years. Always confirm the current threshold with your own legal or finance office before planning around it.

What makes a project more expensive

• Council paperwork with electronic signature. Moving from informing to processing multiplies the scope: identity, signature, registry and retention.
• Integration with legacy municipal systems. If the population register or the case management system has no API, it has to be solved another way and the budget shows it.
• Sources that do not exist yet. If the transport data is not published, somebody has to publish it first.
• Real multilingual support. Not translating: maintaining. Each language is content somebody has to keep current forever.

And what adds less to the cost than you would expect: the design. A civic platform done well is plain by necessity — people open it to find out when the bus comes, not to admire it.

What to ask before signing

• Who owns the code? It should be in the council’s name, along with the App Store and Google Play accounts. Otherwise changing supplier means changing platform.
• What happens when a source changes format? It will. Ask whether that is covered by maintenance or billed each time.
• Who ships the app updates? Apple and Google change requirements every year, and that is not the council’s call. Ask whether it is inside the fee or billed each time.
• What does year two cost? The running cost is what decides whether the platform is still alive in 2030.
• Can I see it working? If a supplier cannot show you a platform of theirs in production with real users, you are paying for their learning curve.

Our reference

SomosTorre is the civic platform for Torrelavega: more than twenty-five data sources, incident reports, council paperwork, events, local commerce and an AI assistant, on web and in native iOS and Android apps. More than 2,500 residents have it installed in a town of 52,000, the downloads are organic, it is catalogued on datos.gob.es, and Eolas Prints S.L. is listed as a solution provider on the European Commission’s Smart Cities Marketplace.

We built it, launched it and run it. That is why we can publish these figures: they are not a textbook estimate, they are what it costs us.

Almost nobody publishes these figures. We can because we are the ones paying them.