What drives the cost is scope. A single workflow, like automatically texting a dentist when their case moves from design to milling, is a small build. A full operations system that covers case tracking, digital impression intake, pickup and delivery routes, and remake paperwork end to end is a bigger one, because it has to read from multiple places (your lab management software, a scanner upload folder, a driver's phone) and make decisions across all of them without breaking anything. A full custom web product, with logins for referring dentists, billing, and multi-location support, is bigger again.
The other factor is whether we just build it or also run it. Build-only hands you the system and steps back. Build-and-operate means we keep watching it: fixing a broken scanner integration at 6am, catching a route that doesn't make sense before a driver wastes an afternoon, escalating to a person when a remake needs a judgment call a computer shouldn't make. Before quoting anything, we map the manual work first and say plainly what the system can take over and what still needs a human, like a technician's eye on a shade match or an awkward call with a difficult dentist.
A sensible way to judge this: add up the hours your team spends each week calling dentists for status, chasing down impressions that didn't upload, planning routes by hand, and redoing remake paperwork, then ask what that time is worth if it went back to production work or growing the account list instead. Precipitate prices each engagement on the value the system creates, not by the hour, so there's no fixed price list to quote here. The accurate next step is a short conversation about your lab's actual case volume and where the bottlenecks are.