A similar project cost less. Is it a useful benchmark?

Someone finds a contract with a title similar to yours and asks: “Why are we budgeting more?” It is a useful question, provided the comparison goes beyond the title and the total.

A public contract price describes a particular purchase. It is not automatically a price list for every project in the same category. To use it well, reconstruct what the buyer was buying.

Check what the agreement covered

“Portal development” might include migration, training and maintenance, or only the software launch. Check whether the amount covers the entire procurement or just one lot.

The starting point matters as well. Extending an existing system and building a new one can have similar titles while requiring very different amounts of work. The source documents are useful here; a short database record cannot explain every detail.

Put the figures on the same basis

Compare amounts consistently:

• excluding VAT with excluding VAT, or including VAT with including VAT;
• the same maintenance period;
• a similar mix of equipment, licences and services;
• the same approach to price changes over time.

Read the labels alongside figures in this portal. Amounts shown in today's złoty are different from nominal amounts in the original notices. The English-language pages still describe the Polish market; they are not benchmarks for suppliers in other countries.

Build a small comparison set

Choose several relevant examples in the contract database. For each, complete two sentences: “This is comparable because…” and “It differs from our project because…”.

A median identifies the middle of a dataset. It does not recommend a price for your particular scope. A range covering the middle half of contracts is not the market's minimum and maximum either.

Take the examples and their scope differences into your budget discussion. A number is much easier to explain when you can show which work it needs to pay for and which parts of the comparison remain uncertain.