Build or buy: custom software or off-the-shelf?

Default to buying

Worth saying first, from a business that builds software: most problems should be solved with a product someone else maintains. Accounting, payroll, email, calendars, file storage, a standard sales pipeline — these are solved problems, the products are mature, and a custom version would cost more to build and more to keep alive.

If a product does ninety percent of what you need and the missing ten percent is tolerable, buy it.

When buying stops working

• You are bending the business to fit the tool. Staff keep a side spreadsheet because the product cannot represent how you actually work. That side spreadsheet is the real system.
• You are gluing products together by hand. Someone copies data from one tool to another every day. The cost of that person's time is invisible on any invoice.
• Per-seat pricing grows faster than you do. A price that was sensible at five users is not at forty, particularly for people who only need to see one screen.
• You cannot get your data out. If exporting everything in a usable form is hard, you do not fully own your records.
• The process is the product. Where the way you do something is why customers choose you, a generic tool flattens exactly the part that matters.

Comparing the cost honestly

The mistake is comparing a monthly subscription with a one-off build quote. Compare both over the years you actually expect to use the thing:

• Buying: seats × price per seat × months, plus the price increases you should expect, plus the hours spent working around what it cannot do.
• Building: the build, plus hosting, plus maintenance for every year it runs. Maintenance is never zero.

Put your own numbers in. We are not going to quote you a typical build price on a page like this, because a range without a scope attached is meaningless — the honest figure depends entirely on what is being built.

The answer that is often right: both

The most common good outcome is neither pure option. Keep the accounting package, the email platform and the CRM. Build the small piece that connects them and removes the daily copying — which is workflow automation, and usually a fraction of the cost of replacing any of the products around it.

Five questions before you decide

1. What does a person currently do by hand because of this gap, and how many hours a week is it?
2. Does an existing product do it well enough, if you are honest about "enough"?
3. Can you export all of your data from the product, in a form another system could read?
4. If you build it, who maintains it in year three, and what does that cost?
5. Who owns the code and the data? Get the answer in writing either way.

Common questions

Is custom software more expensive than SaaS?

Up front, almost always. Over several years it depends on seats, price increases, and what the maintenance costs — which is why the comparison has to be made over the whole period you expect to use it, not on the first invoice. A subscription that looks cheap per month can pass the cost of a build; a build that looks cheap can carry maintenance that never ends.

Does custom software need maintenance?

Yes, always. Operating systems, browsers and the services it connects to all change, and security fixes do not stop. Anyone quoting a build with no ongoing cost is either planning to maintain it for free or planning not to maintain it.

Who owns custom software once it is built?

It should be you — the code, the data, and the right to take both to another developer. Get that in the contract before work starts, not after.

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