Off-the-Shelf or Custom Software? 7 Questions to Decide

Some vendors always recommend building something new (that is how they earn), and some manufacturers always recommend their ready-made product (so do they). We will try it with seven honest questions.

The seven questions

1. How common is your workflow? Accounting, payroll, simple scheduling: mature ready-made solutions exist for these. The more common the process, the clearer the point for off-the-shelf.

2. How often do your people say “the program can’t do that”? If your team takes detours every day, exporting, reworking in Excel, importing again, the software is working against you. That is the strongest signal for custom work.

3. How many users are paying for the subscription? Rented software costs per head per month. Manageable with 5 users, but with 30 it runs into six figures over the years, and building starts to pay off fast. Details in the cost breakdown in the article What does custom software cost?.

4. Are your workflows a competitive advantage? If you work faster, more precisely or differently than the competition, do you really want to pour those workflows into the same off-the-shelf software your competitors use too?

5. What happens to your data if you want to leave the vendor? With many rental solutions: a painful export, half your data, a fresh start. How this dependency arises is explained in Vendor lock-in explained.

6. Is there a middle way? Often yes, and it gets checked far too rarely: taking a proven, freely available piece of software and adapting it to fit. For an association we did exactly that instead of building an expensive new system: Cliantra. Less revenue for us, the right solution for the client.

7. Who should be able to maintain the solution in five years? Off-the-shelf: the manufacturer, as long as it exists and wants to. Custom software with clean, documented code: any development team, even without us.

The honest verdict

Off-the-shelf wins when your workflow is common, few users are paying and no special cases weigh on you. Then you buy the ready-made program, and in the first conversation we will even tell you which one we know and would recommend.

Custom work wins when detours are part of daily life, many users cost subscription fees, or your workflows are special. What you get then, right up to full ownership of code and data, is on our page about custom software.

Unsure? These are exactly the questions our pricing calculator asks, and at the end there is an honest recommendation, not a sales pitch.