For twenty years the advice was sensible: buy standard software, and only build your own if you really have no choice. Custom meant long, expensive and risky.
That advice is getting old.
When off-the-shelf is the right answer
Let us start with the honest part. If a product on the market covers your need properly, use it. Accounting, payroll, email, video calls: nobody should build those. If the scoping workshop shows that an existing tool would do the job, we will say so, even though it means no project for us.
What standard software really costs
The price on the website is not the whole bill. A standard product was designed for an average company that does not exist. So your teams adapt: a spreadsheet next to the software for what it cannot do, the same data typed twice, a process changed to fit the screens, a per-user licence that grows every year.
None of this appears on an invoice. All of it is paid, every day, in hours.
What has changed
Building software used to require a team for months. Today, a senior engineer directing AI agents produces in two weeks what took far longer a few years ago, with automated tests to keep it reliable. The tools, the hosting and the building blocks have matured too.
The result is simple: the price of made-to-measure has dropped, while the price of making do has not.
Custom does not mean starting from zero
Made-to-measure rarely replaces everything. Most of our projects connect to what is already there, an ERP for instance, and add the part that was missing: the tool your site workers actually open, the back-office shaped around how orders really travel.
What it means for you
The question used to be “can we afford custom software?”. It is becoming “why are we still working around a tool that was not made for us?”. If the honest answer is “because it fits”, keep it. If not, the alternative is closer than you think.