Custom or off-the-shelf business software: how to choose

Five questions

1. Does your work look like that of others in your trade? If so, someone has already written the program. If your strength is a way of working others don't have, a standard program forces you to give it up.
2. How many exceptions do you have? A three-price list, a discount for certain customers, an approval step. One or two fit in the settings of ready-made software. Ten end up in a spreadsheet on the side.
3. How many people will use it? A per-user fee weighs little with three people and a lot with forty.
4. Does it have to talk to other programs? If you need a connection the ready-made software doesn't have, the saving can vanish.
5. What would it cost you if the vendor changed prices or closed? That depends on how deep the program sits in your work.

When off-the-shelf pays off

• Accounting, payroll and normal invoicing: they follow legal rules that change, and keeping up is the job of those who sell them. There is no sense in rebuilding them.
• A common job, such as a newsletter or a sales CRM for a few salespeople.
• When you have to start next week.
• When you don't yet know what you need. A year on ready-made software teaches a lot.

When custom pays off

• The rules are yours and no program follows them without awkward workarounds.
• Data travels across three programs and someone retypes it by hand.
• Everything already sits in a spreadsheet that has become the real business system, and it works because you built it around your work.
• You have many users, and the fees exceed what building it would cost.

I compare fees and data ownership on the software without a subscription page.

The third road: both together

Often the right answer lies in between. Keep ready-made software for what it does well, and build only the missing piece, connected through APIs.

For example: invoicing stays in Fatture in Cloud, the shop stays on WooCommerce, and the custom software holds only orders, stock and the special price list. The Dracartys CRM began like that: customers, products and quotes, with WooCommerce and e-invoicing connected from outside.

It costs less and risks less: if one piece changes, the others stay.

How I help you decide

In the analysis, which is free, I look at how you work. If a ready-made program does what you need, I tell you and that is the end of it. If custom pays off, the method is on the Custom web apps page and the costs in what custom software costs.

Frequently asked questions

Which one costs less in the end?

At the start, off-the-shelf nearly always costs less. Over many years the sum changes with the number of users and modules. Do it with real prices: the fee times users times ten years, with the increases you have already seen.

What if I choose off-the-shelf and it isn't enough?

You have lost nothing, as long as the data can be exported. Check that before signing. What you learn from the ready-made program becomes the analysis for custom software.

How long does custom software take?

A first useful version, on one part of the work, is usually measured in weeks. The whole project depends on how many parts it has: I put it in writing after the analysis, with milestones paid one at a time.

What happens if you disappear?

Code and database are yours and I give them to you if you ask. Another developer can carry on, because I use PHP, MySQL and JavaScript, which are common technologies. With off-the-shelf software the same risk runs the other way: if the vendor closes, what counts is being able to export your data.

Read more

• The service: Custom business web apps
• Work of this kind: CRM Dracartys
• More pages like this: Before you decide