A focused eLearning app — 10-15 courses, mobile and web, xAPI tracking — typically runs $40,000-$80,000 over 10-14 weeks. Full education software development — LMS with custom authoring, multi-tenancy, SIS integration and SCORM runtime — is $120,000-$280,000 over 4-6 months. What drives cost up is the number of LMS integrations, compliance scope (COPPA adds meaningful work for K-12), jurisdictions for data residency and real-time features like live classrooms. We scope this in a discovery phase before writing any code, so the estimate is real rather than a placeholder you negotiate down.