Custom software or off the shelf: how to tell which you need
Off-the-shelf software is almost always the right answer. We build custom software for a living and we will still tell you that, because the cases where building is correct are specific and recognisable, and everything outside them is a more expensive way to get less.
Buy, every time, when
- The job is a solved problem. Payroll, accounts, email, card payments. Thousands of businesses need exactly what you need. Somebody has spent ten years on the edge cases and sells it for a fraction of what one of those years cost.
- You are not sure what you want yet. A cheap tool used badly for six months will teach you more about your own process than any specification written in a meeting room.
- The process is ordinary and you think it is special. Worth checking honestly. A lot of "we do it differently" turns out to be "we have always done it this way".
Build when one of these is true
- The process is the business. If how you do the thing is why customers choose you, software that forces you into somebody else’s shape is sanding off the edge you compete on.
- You are paying per seat or per site for ten per cent of a product. Five sites on a per-site licence, using a fraction of it, is a recurring cost with no end date, and that sum is worth doing over three years rather than one month.
- Three tools and a person in the middle. When the integration is a colleague retyping things on a Monday, the thing you are buying is not software, it is their morning, every week.
- Nothing on the market fits. Genuinely rare, and worth proving by trying two things properly first.
- The data is the asset and you cannot get it out. If your history is locked in a product you are unhappy with, every year of waiting raises the cost of leaving.
The middle route most people miss
It is rarely all or nothing. Keep the accounts package, keep the payroll, and build only the piece in the middle that nobody sells: the bit that joins them, the bit that is yours. That is usually a fraction of the cost of replacing anything, and it removes the person in the middle, which was the actual problem.
The comparison to insist on
Not price against price. Three years of licences, per seat, per site, plus the cost of the manual work the product does not do, against a one-off build plus support. Then ask the question nobody asks the off-the-shelf supplier: what happens to our data if we leave, and what does the price do at renewal?
Where building is the right call, it is on custom software. Where joining what you already have is the better answer, that is integrations and data.