Custom software or off-the-shelf

Custom software is software written from scratch around one business’s workflow; off-the-shelf software is a product written for the shared needs of many businesses and sold by subscription or license. The decision between the two is usually made from the wrong place: feature lists get laid side by side, and custom software is chosen for the sake of three items that look missing.

Off-the-shelf is the right answer for most work

Accounting, payroll, email, customer records, support tickets. This work runs the same way in thousands of companies, and the products that do it well have been in development for years.

Writing custom software in these areas means solving a problem someone else has already solved, at a higher price and with a worse result. The maintenance is yours too: regulations change, browsers change, a security hole turns up.

An off-the-shelf product will have parts that do not fit you. In most cases the right move is to bring the workflow closer to the product, not the software closer to the workflow.

Three cases where custom software earns its cost

The first is when the workflow is the very thing that sets you apart from competitors. If you calculate quotes differently from everyone else, or plan production differently, and that difference is why customers choose you, squeezing it into a product everybody uses files the difference down.

The second is when people fill the gaps between tools that do not connect. If the same data is entered by hand in three separate places and the errors come from there, the need may not be a new product but a small piece of software that connects the existing ones.

The third is when the product’s price grows with usage until the business can no longer carry it. A per-user fee is reasonable at ten people; at five hundred it is a different calculation.

Four questions before deciding

Does this work set you apart from competitors, or is it work everyone does? If it does not set you apart, off-the-shelf.

Can the part that does not fit be solved by changing the workflow? If it can, try that first.

Who will keep the software running for five years? The cost of custom software does not end the day it is written; maintenance, updates and having someone around who knows it are a permanent line item.

Does the data need to stay with you? In some work, where the data lives and how it gets out matters more than the features.

There is a middle route

The decision is usually not binary. The most common and healthiest setup leaves the off-the-shelf products where they are and fills only the gap between them with custom software.

The accounting product stays, the CRM stays; between the two, a small application gets written that runs your quoting logic. That way custom software sits only where the difference is, and the maintenance burden stays small.

This route depends on the products opening their data to the outside. Checking whether a product has an API when you choose it keeps that door open later.

The cost of deciding on custom software

What you pay for when commissioning custom software is not only development. You make the decisions: which field is required, what happens in which case, who sees what. With an off-the-shelf product, someone else had already made them.

That is why the biggest delay in custom software projects comes not from code but from decisions that have not been made. Counting the decisions behind each screen while writing scope predicts the schedule better than the code does.

The short version

If it is work everyone does, off-the-shelf. If it is what sets you apart and there is someone to look after it for five years, custom software. For everything in between: keep the products, commission the gap.