Look at your company's invoices for the past year and add up the software subscriptions: the booking tool, the spreadsheets, the CRM, the inventory program. Now ask yourself two questions. How much of each tool do you actually use? And which of them do you own?
For most small businesses the answers are uncomfortable: maybe 20% of the features get used, and nothing is owned. Stop paying and the software switches off, with your data living at someone else's address. This article lays out the other path: a tool built around your business, paid for once, owned by you.
The short version
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Price from | 500 € for small tools, one-time |
| Model | One price, no monthly subscription |
| Ownership | The software and the code are yours |
| Hosting | First year included, then an annual renewal scoped to the project |
| Build time | 1-2 weeks for small tools |
The complete and always up-to-date pricing for all services is on our pricing page.
A story from practice: three locations and one paper diary
We recently worked with a car wash operating across three locations, each with several bays. Bookings lived on paper. Whoever held the diary knew what was going on; everyone else called, asked, copied things over and hoped nothing had changed in the meantime.
The fix was not some grand system. We built them a calendar: one screen showing every location and every bay, available to everyone in the company from their phones. The paper went into history and the whole team finally looks at the same state.
The entire app cost less than 500 €. One-time. No monthly fee, no per-user pricing, no "Pro" plan hiding the one feature the business cannot run without. The tool is theirs, today and in ten years.
That is the whole point of custom software: you do not build everything software can do, you build what your business needs.
The software you pay for but don't use
Off-the-shelf tools are not bad. The problem is that they are sold as "everything for everyone" and billed as if you used everything every day. In practice it looks like this:
Booking and scheduling tools. A monthly fee, and with some of them a commission per booking. A salon with regular clients ends up paying, month after month, for a tool built to hunt new ones.
ERP and inventory suites. Big packages with modules for manufacturing, logistics and accounting, of which a five-person company opens two. The rest gets paid for because the bundle cannot be taken apart.
CRM and project management tools. Priced per user per month. Every new employee means another subscription, so companies end up sharing logins instead of letting the tool grow with them.
And the other extreme is paper and Excel. No subscription there, but no system either: a diary one person holds, a spreadsheet that lives on one computer, versions flying around by email so nobody knows which one is current.
Custom software aims at exactly the middle: the 20% of features you actually use, built around your process, without everything else.
Renting versus owning: the maths
Take a perfectly ordinary example: a tool at 40 € per month. That is 480 € a year, or 1,440 € over three years. After those three years you own nothing; stop paying and you lose both the tool and the habits your team built around it.
A small custom tool costs from 500 €, once. The first year of hosting and maintenance is included, and from year two there is an annual renewal agreed to the scope of the project. By the second year the maths is already on ownership's side, and the tool does exactly what your process needs, with no features to wade through.
To be fair, subscriptions have their arguments too: a large SaaS ships new features constantly, and for some businesses that is worth every euro. We cover when a ready-made tool is genuinely the better choice further down, because there is no point selling you something you do not need.
What can be built to measure
We split custom software into three levels, and these are the same prices listed on our pricing page:
Small tool, from 500 €. One screen, one job. A booking calendar for multiple locations, a work-hours log, an order overview. Done in a week or two.
Business app, from 1,500 €. Multiple users with roles and permissions, reports, export to PDF or Excel, migration of your existing spreadsheet data. For a business that has outgrown Excel.
Business system, from 3,500 €. A portal your clients log into to see their quotes, orders and documents themselves, integrations with the tools you already use, and replacement of the SaaS you pay for today.
Every level includes the same things: a one-time price, the first year of hosting and maintenance, and ownership of the software and the code. Everything works on phones, tablets and computers, with no app-store installs.
When you should NOT build custom software
The same thing we say about webshops: do not build if you do not need to build.
If a ready-made tool covers your process almost entirely, its price is reasonable and you can export your data whenever you like, stay on it. If it matters to you that the tool gains the new features of a big platform every month, the subscription is the price of that development and it is a fair trade.
Custom software wins in three situations: when the business runs on paper or on spreadsheets bursting at the seams, when you pay a serious subscription for a sliver of the features, and when your process simply does not fit any ready-made mould, so the company bends around the software instead of the other way round.
The free consultation starts with how you work today. If the honest answer is "stay on your current tool", that is exactly what we will tell you.
Who owns it and what you actually get
This is the difference no subscription will ever offer:
- The software and the code are yours. The one-time price buys the tool, not a licence to use the tool.
- The accounts are in your name. Hosting and the domain are opened for your company, not for ours.
- You are not tied to us. The tool keeps working if we ever part ways, and any developer can take it over.
- First year worry-free. Hosting and maintenance are included in the price; from year two an annual renewal is agreed to the scope of the project.
The next step
If reading this made you think of your own diary, your own spreadsheet or your own subscription, that is probably a good sign it is worth a conversation. Describe how that part of your business looks today and in a short call we will tell you what a custom tool would cost, and whether it is worth building at all.
Get in touch, we reply the same day.