Build it or buy it? Custom software vs off-the-shelf

If an off-the-shelf product does the job for £40 a month, pay the £40 and get on with your day. Odd advice from somebody who builds bespoke web applications for a living.

When should you buy off-the-shelf software?

Most of the time. Off-the-shelf software is built for the average version of a business, and for loads of jobs you are the average version. Your accounts don’t need to be special, and neither does payroll, your email or the calendar people use to book a call with you.

If you’re going to either a) save time b) save money or c) both, then it might be worth considering custom software.

Laura at Fashion Toolbox runs a one-person business, and the Start a project page on her website books calls through Calendly. We built her a custom website. Building her a custom calendar as well would have been daft.

Buy off-the-shelf when:

• Loads of other businesses do this job exactly the way you do.
• You’re starting out and the numbers are small. Paying a platform a fee on every booking is a fair trade when you’re taking a handful a week.
• Nobody on your team spends their day working around it.

When does building your own pay?

Two situations.

The first is fees. If you sell tickets, bookings, rooms or tables through a platform, you pay something on every one. Take how many you sell a year, multiply by the fee on each, and add what the platform charges you annually. If that total is in the same territory as building your own, you’re renting something you could own.

The second is fit. The product does 80% of what you need and the missing 20% is the bit that makes you money. Somebody spends hours a week typing information out of one system and into another. Your staff answer the same phone call all day because the website can’t answer it. Or the whole operation hangs off a spreadsheet that one person understands and everybody else is scared to open.

Fit is harder to price than fees, so look at what you’ve stopped doing because the software won’t let you. That list is the cost. I went through the signs in more detail in when off-the-shelf software stops working.

Cannon Hall Farm: the platform kept saying no

Cannon Hall Farm in Barnsley is one of the UK’s busiest farm attractions. For years they sold tickets through a well-known ticketing platform used right across the industry. The trouble was the farm runs weather guarantees, paid livestreams, sessions with two start times on the same day and tickets bundled with a sheep-shearing demo, and a platform built for every attraction at once couldn’t bend to any of that. Every new idea ended up as a clumsy workaround or a flat no.

So in 2021 we built them their own, and we’ve been adding to it ever since. Some of what it does now that the old one couldn’t:

• If it rains over a set amount on the day of your visit, the system sends you a free return pass on its own. On one wet day in May it issued 416 of them.
• Online events like the Shire Horse Special and the Online Country Show sold over 2,100 tickets in a single month, to people who were never going to come through the gate.
• Around 70% of bookings add paid parking at checkout.
• Birthday parties get booked and paid for through the same account, and more than 250 have gone through since that launched in 2025.

It’s taken over 219,000 bookings and sold more than £10 million in tickets. Over 200,000 people have a Passport account with it, up from under 40,000 three years ago. Ticket revenue is up 12.9% year on year on 4.6% more visitors, so the farm is making more from each visit, helped by the add-ons and events the old platform couldn’t sell.

Glasscraft: the phone never stopped

Glasscraft are one of the UK’s only independent glass manufacturers, with over 150 people across three facilities. Their old website gave trade customers nothing to do. Getting a quote meant ringing up, and so did finding out where your order was, so somebody had to pick up every time.

We built a Quick Quote tool that drops every request into a dashboard for the team, and an order tracker wired over a secure connection into Glasscraft’s own manufacturing system. Customers type in their order number and get a live status straight from the factory. The quote tool brings in 60 to 80 requests a month. The tracker gets used 100 to 200 times a month, which is 100 to 200 phone calls nobody at Glasscraft has to answer.

You can buy a quote form off the shelf for next to nothing. The useful part is the connection into their manufacturing system, and you can’t buy that, because it’s theirs.

Are you renting or owning?

Every monthly subscription is something you rent. I said this about website builders in my WordPress video: if Squarespace decide to double their prices tomorrow, you’re stuck. Pay up, or leave and lose the lot. The same goes for any software you pay a platform for. The price and the terms are someone else’s decision, and so is what happens to your customer data.

That last one matters more than people think. At Cannon Hall Farm, the relationship with every visitor used to sit inside somebody else’s system. Now the farm can see revenue, repeat visits, which customers are lapsing and how spending shifts across weekends and promotions, because the data lives in their own system.

When we build something, the client owns it, software and data both. Nobody’s renting it back off us, and if a client wants somebody else to run it, they can. Most stay because it’s easier.

▶Play the video: 43% of ALL websites are using this 'dead' platform

If you’re weighing up website builders rather than bigger software, I’ve gone through that in Wix vs WordPress and is WordPress dead?

What does building cost you after launch?

Building isn’t a one-off purchase, and anyone who tells you it is wants your money. A bespoke system takes a few months to build. Once it’s live somebody has to look after it, and if it runs a core part of your business you’ll keep wanting to add to it. Cannon Hall Farm’s system has been in development since 2021, because the farm keeps coming up with new things to sell and the software can say yes now.

Put that in the sum next to the subscription you’d be cancelling. We start with whichever problem costs the most, get that live, and add to it from there, so you’re not paying for everything on day one.

Questions to answer before you decide

• What do we pay this platform a year, all in, fees included?
• What have we stopped doing, or never started, because the software won’t do it?
• Who’s copying data between systems by hand, and for how many hours a week?
• Is the thing it can’t do part of the reason customers choose us?
• If the price doubled next year, could we leave without losing our customer data?

If your answers come out small, buy the software and spend the £12,000 on something that’ll bring in money. There’s no prize for building your own calendar.