Do you recognize that moment? It's time to choose a new solution for your core system. But you are hesitating between build or buy. What are the advantages and disadvantages again? And how do you decide what is the best choice for your organization? We would like to help you on your way in this blog.

Once upon a time, we made everything ourselves. Nowadays, we look for a standard solution. The reason is that this often seems to be cheaper. But what if it isn't? What if making a solution is cheaper and better fits your company's needs?

Building a system yourself ensures that it fits exactly with your organization's processes. When your organization is at the point where a new core system needs to be chosen, the choice to build something yourself always beckons. 

The challenge here, however, is that everything has to be figured out, built, and maintained by the customer. The solution created may fit perfectly. But what if changes are needed? Then it turns out that much of the logic is fixed in code and it is quite expensive to adapt the software. Moreover, developers are scarce. So, the choice often falls on buy instead of build.

When building a solution yourself is too expensive, the choice is often made to purchase a standard package. Thanks to good marketing and success stories from suppliers, managers dare to make this choice. There are also a number of advantages to buying a solution.

  • Fewer or no developers are needed

  • No development time, faster time to market

  • Other businesses use it too, so you don't have to reinvent the wheel

However, there are also disadvantages to a standard package. Because the standard package often just doesn't fit the current business processes in your organization. For this reason, you have to adapt the standard package, which creates a number of problems. 

  • The software is no longer easy to update

  • Updates are expensive and time-consuming

  • A mandatory update for support or the latest security update

Both solutions have advantages and disadvantages, so it just depends on what suits your organization. In both cases, you have to take into account the lead time for developing a new feature. With custom software, a development process can easily take two months. And with an update to a standard package, this is often even longer (or not possible at all!). 

Fortunately, there is a third option. What if you don't have to think about the technology at all, but you can have an application that completely suits your company? An application that is easily adaptable, even when your wishes change? Then you end up with tailor-made software. 

Tailor-made software means that you use an existing platform, which can then be modeled entirely as desired. The technology and the model are disconnected from each other so you have all the advantages of building it yourself and all the advantages of a standard package.

In this third variant, actually, only the model is created. This model is organization-specific and will always fit every case perfectly. By developing only a model, the technique is less important. The technology and the model are independent. When a new tech stack comes along it means that you can silently move to a new version. This no longer requires new customization.

  • Continues to fit the organization, focus can go to operational excellence

  • Key new technologies continue to be supported and become available

  • No completely new implementation process when there is a new version, as the model remains the same

Got excited and would like to learn more about custom software, the build or buy discussion, or have another low code question. Feel free to send an email, click on get in touch.