Custom software at an agreed price

If an off-the-shelf system can do what you need, it is almost always the cheaper choice, and I will tell you when that is the case. A booking system, CRM or accounting package that a thousand other businesses already pay for is maintained by somebody else, and you share that bill with every other customer. Custom software makes sense when the way you work is what sets you apart, and the standard system forces you to work like everybody else.

The usual sign is a spreadsheet that has grown into the tool the company actually runs on, or three systems that each do part of the job while somebody moves data between them by hand. In that situation a small system built for the task is often cheaper over three years than the licences and the hours spent making the standard tools fit together.

Customer portals where your customers can see orders, documents or status themselves instead of calling to ask. Internal tools for quotes, planning or quality control that replace a spreadsheet with too many tabs. Booking flows with rules a standard system cannot express. And smaller SaaS products or MVPs, where an idea needs to reach real users before more money goes into it.

Nearly all of those systems need to talk to something you already have. That can be e-conomic or Billy for invoicing, Shopify or WooCommerce for orders, HubSpot or Pipedrive for customers, or a supplier's API. The integrations are built with a queue, retries and an alert that reaches a person, because that is where systems usually break quietly.

A defined build typically costs DKK 24,000–96,000 ex. VAT. Where it lands in that range depends mostly on four things: how many different kinds of user the system has to handle, how many other systems it connects to, whether data has to move over from an old system, and how many special business rules have to go into the code.

The price is agreed in writing once the scope is described, and after that it is fixed. If the job is too big to describe properly up front, we split it, so the first part becomes a usable system and the rest is priced once you have tried it. That gives a better product than a large specification nobody could test against reality.

The code lives in your own repository, the hosting and the domain are in your name, and the documentation comes with the first delivery. The system is built in ordinary, widely used technologies such as TypeScript, React, PHP, Laravel and Postgres, so the next developer can read it without first learning a home-made framework. If you later want an in-house team or another supplier to take over, that is planned from the start rather than negotiated afterwards.