Buying is right more often than vendors who build will tell you. Here is the honest test, from a company that does the building.
Key Takeaways
- Buying is right more often than vendors who build will tell you.
- Here is the honest test, from a company that does the building.
We build custom software, so treat what follows accordingly. Buying is the right answer more often than a company in our position usually admits.
The test
Is the process you want to computerise one that thousands of other businesses also do, in more or less the same way?
Accounting, payroll, email, storing documents, running an online store, booking appointments. These are solved. Products exist that have absorbed years of edge cases you have not thought of yet, sold to enough customers that the price is a fraction of building it.
Building your own version of a solved problem is the most expensive mistake in this area, and it is usually made because a product did not match an internal process exactly. Changing the process is normally cheaper than funding a rebuild.
When custom earns its cost
Three situations.
The process is genuinely yours. Not "we do invoicing slightly differently", but a workflow specific to your business that no product anticipates. A distribution model, a pricing rule, an approval chain particular to how you operate.
Nothing fits the local context. Nepali dates, local payment gateways, government reporting formats, the way your industry works here. International products often handle these badly or not at all, and the workarounds cost daily.
The systems have to talk. When you already run several things and the expensive part is the manual copying between them, custom is often the cheapest option, because the integration is the product.
The hybrid most businesses actually need
Not one or the other. Buy the solved parts, build the piece that is yours, and connect them.
A retailer might buy accounting software, use a product for the online store, and have a small custom tool for the stock allocation rule that is specific to their business. Each part is cheap because it is doing one job.
This is what we recommend most often, and it usually means we build less than the client first expected.
The arithmetic people skip
Compare over five years, not at purchase.
A product at a per-user monthly fee looks cheap at five users and considerably less so at fifty. Custom software costs more upfront and then costs hosting plus whatever changes you ask for. Somewhere there is a crossover, and it depends entirely on your headcount and how much the product you would otherwise buy actually charges.
Do that sum with real numbers before deciding. It frequently surprises people in both directions.
What to ask a vendor who only builds
Ask which products they considered and why they ruled each one out. A vendor who has not looked is not advising you, and a vendor who cannot name a product that might work has either not thought about it or does not want to.
Our own starting point for a custom web application is NPR 80,000, and the honest advice in a good number of first conversations is still to look at a product first. If we cannot describe why building beats buying for your specific case, buying probably wins.
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Written by
AntByte Labs
Engineering · AntByte Labs
AntByte Labs is a Engineering at AntByte Labs, sharing expert insights on technology, software development, and digital innovation to help businesses grow.