What an Odoo project actually costs in Saudi Arabia
Five cost lines, two of which never appear in a quotation. Written so you can challenge our numbers as easily as anyone else's.
Ask three Odoo partners for a quotation and you will get three numbers that differ by a factor of four. That is not because one of them is dishonest. It is because ERP quotations are priced on scope, and nobody agreed what the scope was before the numbers were written.
1. The Odoo licence
Paid to Odoo, not to your partner. Priced per user per month, with the total depending on edition, hosting choice, contract length and how many of your staff genuinely need a full user account rather than portal access. A twenty-person company often needs eight paid users, not twenty — and the difference over three years is large enough to be worth an hour of thought.
2. Implementation
This is the partner's fee, and it is hours multiplied by a rate. Our rate is 300 SAR per hour excluding VAT, published so you can multiply it yourself. Useful reference points from projects we have delivered:
- Finance and sales for a small company: 40–60 hours.
- Full operation with stock and purchasing: 100–160 hours.
- Add manufacturing with real costing: another 60–120 hours.
- Each integration: 12–40 hours depending on how well the other side is documented.
3. Support after go-live
Budget for it from the start, because you will use it. A reasonable planning figure is fifteen to twenty per cent of the implementation cost per year, higher in year one. Companies that skip a support agreement do not spend less — they spend the same money in emergency hours at short notice.
4. Your team's time
The cost nobody writes down. A rollout consumes real hours from your accountant, your warehouse supervisor and whoever knows why the pricing works the way it does. Plan for one to two days a week from three or four key people during the project. Companies that treat this as free are the ones whose projects slip — not because the partner was slow, but because a decision waited three weeks for a meeting.
5. Data cleanup
The second invisible cost. Duplicate customers, products with no unit of measure, an opening trial balance that does not balance, three years of stock that was never counted. Somebody pays to fix this — either you do it internally, or you pay a consultant's hourly rate to do it for you. Doing it before the project starts is always the cheaper option.
A quotation that is half the price of the others is usually half the scope. Before comparing totals, compare the assumption lists — that is where the difference actually lives.
How to read any ERP quotation
- Ask what happens when the estimate is exceeded — who absorbs the extra hours, and at what rate.
- Ask which integrations are included by name, not by category.
- Ask whether data migration covers opening balances or only master data — these differ by tens of hours.
- Ask who owns the custom code, and get the answer in the contract rather than in an email.
- Ask what the support agreement costs before you sign the implementation, not after.
The hour ranges above come from our own delivered projects and are planning figures, not a quotation. Your numbers will move with scope, data condition and decision speed.