Software
Build when the process is a genuine competitive advantage that products force you to compromise, or when the total cost of the current patchwork exceeds the cost of owning something fitted. Otherwise buy.
If the way you quote, schedule, price or fulfil is part of why customers choose you, bending it to fit a product's assumptions erodes the advantage. That is the clearest legitimate case for building, and it is narrower than most businesses assume.
Several subscriptions bridged by spreadsheets, exports and manual re-entry can quietly cost more than a fitted system, but only when the comparison includes the labour, the errors and the delay, not the licence fees alone. Do that arithmetic honestly before deciding.
If a category has established players and your requirements are ordinary, building is spending scarce engineering to reach a starting line others crossed years ago.
Whatever you decide, budget the decade rather than the build.
Custom software needs hosting, monitoring, dependency updates, security patching and someone who understands it after the original team has moved on. Projects that fail usually funded the first version and nothing after it.
Ask whether customers would notice if it changed. If the process could be replaced with an industry-standard one and nobody outside the company would care, it is not a differentiator; it is just familiar.
Build when the process is a genuine competitive advantage that products force you to compromise, or when the total cost of the current patchwork exceeds the cost of owning something fitted. Otherwise buy.
You have read what we think. If you want to know what it means for your case specifically, describe it and we will tell you which parts of when should you build custom software? actually apply — and which do not.
