Key takeaways
- If a ready-made tool covers most of your process, start there.
- Custom software pays off when your process is your advantage.
- Count the total cost over three to five years, not just the first year.
- A hybrid approach, ready-made core plus custom integrations, often works best.
We build custom software for a living, and we still tell some clients not to. A ready-made tool is often faster, cheaper and good enough. The trick is knowing when it stops being good enough. These five questions usually settle it.
1. Does a ready-made tool cover most of your process?
List the ten things your team does every day in this area. If an existing tool handles most of them without strange workarounds, use it. Accounting, email marketing and basic CRM are well served by mature products. Writing your own rarely makes sense.
2. Is your process part of your advantage?
If the way you price, schedule, manufacture or serve customers is what makes you better than competitors, forcing it into a generic tool can blunt that edge. This is where custom software earns its cost.
3. What will it cost over five years?
SaaS looks cheap per user per month, but costs grow with your team and with add-ons. Custom software has a larger upfront cost and a smaller ongoing one. Compare both over three to five years, including training, integrations and the time your staff lose to workarounds.
| Off-the-shelf | Custom | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Low | Higher |
| Time to start | Days | Weeks to months |
| Fit to process | Generic | Exact |
| Ongoing cost | Grows per user | Hosting and support |
| Control and data | Vendor's rules | Yours |
4. How many systems need to talk to each other?
When data has to flow between your website, app, accounting software, warehouse and WhatsApp, off-the-shelf tools often turn into a pile of exports and imports. Custom software, or custom integrations between tools, can remove that double entry.
5. What happens if the vendor changes?
Prices go up, features get removed, companies get acquired. If a tool is critical to daily operations, consider how hard it would be to move away. With custom software you own the code and data, so that risk sits with you rather than a vendor.
The middle path
Many of our projects are hybrids: a proven tool for the standard parts, with a custom layer for the bits that are unique. For example, Tally for accounts, a custom order and dispatch system for operations, and a small app for field staff, all connected so nobody types the same data twice.
Frequently asked questions
Specialist pages from the Core I-Solutions family that cover this topic in more detail.