Should you buy software or build it?

Most businesses that ask this should buy. That’s an odd thing to read on a development studio’s website, but talking someone into a custom build they didn’t need is how you get a client who resents the invoice.

Here’s the honest test.

Buy if any of these are true

• An existing product does 80% of what you need. The last 20% is almost never worth the price difference. Adapt your process to the tool.
• Your process isn’t unusual. If ten thousand other businesses do it roughly your way, someone has already built good software for it and spread the cost across all of them.
• You can’t describe what the software should do. Not a criticism — it just means you’re not ready. Custom development converts a clear specification into working software; it can’t supply the clarity.
• The problem is a process problem. Software makes a good process faster and a bad process faster to fail. If nobody follows the current procedure, building software won’t change that.
• It’s a compliance or accounting function. Payroll, tax, invoicing — buy it. The rules change constantly and a vendor absorbs that for you.

Build if you hit these

• You’re paying for four tools and re-keying between them. The subscriptions plus the hours often exceed a build inside two years.
• The workaround has become the system. When a spreadsheet has become load-bearing and everyone is afraid to touch it, that spreadsheet is describing the software you need — usefully, in detail.
• The thing you do differently is the thing you’re good at. If your advantage is a process no product supports, forcing it into off-the-shelf software erodes the advantage.
• You’ve outgrown the tool’s ceiling. Per-seat pricing that scales badly, or a hard limit you keep bumping into.

The cost comparison people get wrong

Comparing a $6,000 build against a $200/month subscription looks obvious until you count properly. Over three years the subscription is $7,200 — and that’s before per-seat increases and price rises. But the build has costs the subscription doesn’t: hosting, maintenance, and the fact that when something breaks, it’s yours.

A fair comparison includes, on the buy side, subscription across all seats plus the hours spent working around what it doesn’t do. On the build side: the build, hosting, and a realistic maintenance allowance. Software isn’t furniture — it needs occasional attention or it degrades as everything around it changes.

A question worth asking first

What would have to be true for the off-the-shelf option to work?

Sometimes the answer is “we’d have to change how we do onboarding,” and that turns out to be an improvement you’d wanted anyway. Sometimes it’s “we’d have to stop doing the thing our customers choose us for” — and now you have your answer.