A custom software company that sometimes tells you to buy an existing product may sound surprising. Yet it is often the right answer. Here is how we help clients decide.
Start with the existing product
For accounting, payroll, email or basic customer relationship management, proven products exist and cost a few dozen dollars a month. Building them from scratch would make no sense.
Custom software becomes worthwhile when the way you work is what sets you apart, or when existing products force you into costly workarounds.
Five questions to decide
1. Does the product cover at least 80% of the need without workarounds? If so, buy it. The remaining 20% can often be handled with a small integration or automation.
2. What do the current workarounds cost? Add up the hours spent each week retyping, exporting to Excel or fixing errors. Multiply by the hourly rate and by 52. That number is the real budget of the problem.
3. Is the process stable? Custom software locks a process into code. If you change how you work every three months, wait until it settles.
4. How many users pay for a licence? A $60 per user per month subscription for 40 employees comes to almost $29,000 a year, every year. At that level, a custom tool can pay for itself in two or three years.
5. Who owns the data? With an existing product, your data lives with the vendor, in their format. Check that it can be exported easily. With custom software, the code and the data belong to you.
The third option: combine
In most cases, the best answer is neither “buy everything” nor “build everything”. You keep standard products for what they do well, and only build:
- the integrations that prevent double entry between them;
- a focused tool for the part of the process that is unique to you;
- automations that eliminate repetitive tasks.
This approach costs less and reduces risk, because each piece stays small and replaceable.
The pitfalls on each side
With an existing product: yearly price increases, features that disappear, screens you cannot adapt, and dependence on a vendor that may be acquired.
With custom software: a project that is too big at once, a process poorly defined at the start, and code nobody else can take over. That is why we use widely adopted technologies and hand over the code and documentation at the end of the project.
In short
Buy what is standard, integrate what needs to talk, build what sets you apart. If you are unsure, describe your situation: we will tell you frankly if an existing product is enough.