Custom app vs. off-the-shelf software: how to decide
By Michael James, Principal & Platform Lead at GO Build Labs
Somewhere in your business there's a process held together by a spreadsheet, a shared inbox and one employee who "just knows how it works." At some point you'll ask whether to buy software for it or have software built. People tend to treat that as a big strategic question. In our experience it comes down to a few fairly practical checks.
Start by assuming you'll buy
We build custom software for a living, so this may sound odd coming from us, but if a widely used off-the-shelf product fits about 80% of your process, buy it. Accounting, payroll, email, a basic CRM and document storage are problems other people have already solved well. QuickBooks has thousands of engineer-years in it, and nothing we could build for you would compete with that.
Off-the-shelf software is the right choice whenever your process works the way everyone else's does. You can start using it right away, it keeps improving because thousands of other customers are paying for the improvements, and the price looks more like a lunch bill than a car payment.
When having it built makes sense
There are three situations where custom software is worth what it costs.
The first is when the way you work is the reason customers choose you. If the way you quote, schedule or look after customers is what sets you apart, squeezing it into the same generic software your competitors use wears that advantage down. You don't want to run things exactly the way they do.
The second is when the best off-the-shelf option fits less than about 70% of what you do. Every gap gets filled with a workaround, and every workaround costs something: staff re-typing data from one system into another, exceptions handled from memory, reports pieced together by hand. Below roughly 70%, those costs usually add up to more than building the right thing would.
The third is when per-seat pricing has grown into something like a mortgage payment. Most subscription software charges by the number of people using it, and headcount says very little about the value you get. If you're paying $80 per seat per month for 30 people who use 15% of the product, a custom tool can pay for itself in under two years, and at the end of it you own it.
The middle option most small businesses should take
The best answer usually isn't to replace everything. Keep the everyday systems that work, like QuickBooks for accounting and Gmail for email, and build only the small custom pieces that are specific to you. That might be a quoting tool that knows how you price jobs, a portal your customers log into, or automation that copies information between your systems so nobody has to re-type it.
That way you get custom software where it makes a difference and keep paying off-the-shelf prices for everything else. It's also a lot cheaper than the start-from-scratch rebuild that many agencies like to propose.
Five questions to help you decide
If you're weighing up a particular process, these questions will usually point you one way or the other:
- Does every business in our industry handle this the same way? If so, buy.
- Is there an off-the-shelf product we could use without workarounds? If so, buy.
- Is this part of the reason customers choose us? If so, build.
- Is someone re-typing data from one system into another every week? If so, build the connection between them.
- Are we paying for the improvements this product will get over the next few years, or do we only need what it does today? If it's only today, build it and own it.
If your answers lean toward building and you'd like a second opinion, that's what our free scoping call is for. "You should just use Airtable" is an answer we give more often than you'd expect.