What is custom software?
Usually the wrong answer, so we say it clearly on the rare occasion it is the right one.
Renting is normally correct
Somebody else has already built accounting, email and shop software, they maintain it, and the monthly fee is smaller than the cost of the first month of building your own. Starting from nothing to do an ordinary thing is how money gets wasted.
The test
Is the way you work the thing that makes you money, or just the way you happen to work? If a rented tool forces you to change something customers notice and value, that is when building pays.
The second test is the fee. A subscription per user, per month, forever, for something you will use for a decade, is a number worth writing down in full before comparing.
What we build
Small tools that do one job for one business and then keep doing it without us. One client's site now updates itself from her stock, described in this piece. The wider approach is on our systems page.
Questions worth asking
What happens to it if you stop working with me?
It keeps running, and you own it. We build tools that do not need us afterwards, which is a deliberate choice about what kind of relationship this is rather than a technical detail.
Is a website custom software?
Not usually, and it is worth keeping the words apart. Most sites are pages. It becomes software when it starts doing something, like reading your stock or answering a customer without anybody typing.
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