Guide · 29 August 2026

Should you build software or buy something off the shelf?

Buy it if your process is ordinary. Build it if the way you work is the reason customers choose you, or if you are already paying for four tools that do not talk to each other. Most businesses should buy, and a software company telling you that is worth more than one that never does.

Buy, when the job is the same everywhere

Payroll, accounts, email, calendars, file storage: thousands of businesses do these identically, so somebody has already built a better version than anyone would build for you, and they maintain it for the price of a subscription.

The test is whether you would explain your process to a new employee as "the normal way" or as "how we do it here". If it is the normal way, buy the normal thing.

Build, when the process is the product

Some businesses win because of how they work, not just what they sell. The order of the steps, the checks in the middle, the thing you do that competitors do not. Generic software makes you do that badly, or forces you to drop it.

The other clear case is a business running on four or five subscriptions that do not talk to each other, where somebody spends their week copying between them. That copying is the thing being paid for, and it does not appear on any invoice.

The question that settles most of it

Ask what happens when the person who knows how it works is off for a fortnight. If the answer is that things quietly stop, the knowledge is in a head rather than a system, and that is a build.

If the answer is that somebody else picks up the same tool and carries on, you already have working software and the problem is elsewhere.

What buying costs that nobody counts

Off-the-shelf is cheap per month and expensive in the shape it forces on you. You pay in workarounds: the spreadsheet beside the system, the field used for something it was not meant for, the export somebody does every Friday.

None of that appears in the subscription price, and it is usually the real reason a business outgrows a tool rather than the licence cost.

When we say buy

We turn work down on this basis. If a business needs a booking calendar and nothing else, a booking product will serve them better than anything custom, and saying so costs us one project and keeps a relationship worth more than it.

The honest line is that custom software is worth it when the way you work is genuinely yours, or when the manual work between your tools has become somebody's job. Short of that, buy.

Think this is you?

Tell us what is getting in the way. If we are the wrong people for it, we will say so.

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