Build or buy? Software for a business that doesn't fit the box.

Most businesses shouldn't build most of their software. Accounting, payroll, email and file storage are solved problems, and someone has solved them better than you could afford to. Buy those.

The harder question is the work that's yours: how you quote, schedule, track jobs, or serve a customer in a way competitors don't.

The case for buying

• It's ready today.
• Someone else fixes bugs and keeps it secure.
• If it's the standard way of working in your industry, fitting the tool is fine.

Where buying quietly gets expensive

Subscriptions are easy to start and easy to forget. Zylo's SaaS Management Index tracks software use at larger companies. Its 2024 report found that only 49% of the licences companies paid for were actually used ^[1]. Small businesses have fewer apps, but the same pattern shows up:

• Two tools that don't talk to each other, so someone retypes data between them.
• A "side spreadsheet" that fills the gap the app doesn't cover.
• Paying for the top plan to get one feature.

The case for building

Build when the process is your edge, and every off-the-shelf tool forces you to change it or work around it.

The biggest risk with custom software isn't building. It's building too much at once. The Standish Group has tracked IT project outcomes for decades, and its CHAOS reports keep finding that small projects succeed far more often than large ones. In the 2012 data, projects under US$1 million in labour had a 76% success rate, and large projects did much worse ^[2].

The usual answer: both

1. Buy the commodity tools.
2. Build the one piece that's the core of how you work, and keep it small.
3. Connect them, so data moves on its own and nobody retypes it.

A good partner should show you more than one way to solve it, including "just buy this app", and tell you which they'd pick and why.