Custom software
Custom software — custom business software — is a program built specifically for your company, shaped around the way you work, instead of an off-the-shelf tool you have to bend your business to fit. It runs your real processes (quotes, tracking, stock, scheduling, invoicing) exactly the way you run them, and the code belongs to you.
Almost anything is technically doable. The real question is elsewhere: when it's worth it against an off-the-shelf SaaS or ERP, how much it costs, and how to get it without a six-month tunnel.
Custom is not always the right answer. Let's be clear about that before we talk budget.
An off-the-shelf tool covers 80 % of your need without contortion: accounting, payroll, a generic CRM, appointment booking. Keep it. Don't pay anyone to rebuild a mature tool worse than it already is.
You re-enter the same information across several tools; you pay 400 € a month for a SaaS your team uses like a spreadsheet; your business is too specific for any off-the-shelf software; you need to own the code, manage roles and permissions, integrations, sensitive data; you spend more time working around your tool than working with it.
An eight-person kitchen fitter running its job sites across twelve Excel tabs doesn't have an off-the-shelf software problem. It has a copy-paste problem, and only custom business software built for it solves that — exactly what a business application delivers.
| Off-the-shelf SaaS | SMB ERP | Custom software | |
|---|---|---|---|
| For what | A standard, common need | Running several integrated functions at once | A specific, lasting process |
| Cost | 200 to 600 €/month, forever | Often 10,000 to 50,000 € + yearly licences | 5,000 € per brick, once |
| You own | Nothing, you rent | Nothing, you rent the modules | The code is yours |
| Fit | You bend your business to the tool | You adopt the vendor's standard | The tool fits your business |
| Right moment | The need fits the standard offer | You want everything integrated and accept the standard | The standard tool holds you back more than it helps |
Plenty of SMBs pay for a heavy ERP or SaaS and use a fraction of it. The day you spend your weeks exporting to Excel to make up for what the tool won't do, custom often becomes the rational choice — and cheaper over time. We dig into the real trade-off in SaaS vs custom software.
The market will tell you "between 30,000 and 200,000 €", and that's the problem. On a typical quote, a large share doesn't fund your software: project manager, overhead, margin, and months of spec document. The part that actually produces code rarely tops a quarter of the quote. An SMB ERP, meanwhile, runs on a subscription for life, whether you use it fully or not.
Our stance is different: 5,000 € for a first working brick, deployed live, with the source code that belongs to you. Fixed price. If your full software goes beyond what we can ship cleanly, we don't inflate the invoice: we cut it into bricks, and you start with the one that carries the most value. For the full ranges, see the cost of developing an application.
Why this price holds today: AI cuts code production time by four, as long as a senior developer orchestrates it. We hand that productivity back as a fixed price, not as billed hours. We break down the math in custom business software for 5,000 €.
Discovery call — we understand your business, your problems, and what you concretely do today.
Technical call — we dig into your data, your constraints, the integrations with your existing tools.
A clear spec page — drawn from the two calls. You read it, you validate it. Go or no go.
Mockups — every page of the final software. You picture it before a single line of code is written.
Go, the clock starts — fifteen days of development, the software is delivered.
Building brick by brick cuts the risk through small concrete deliveries, instead of promising the perfect software in six months and delivering it in two years. To choose who you trust with it, read our guide on picking an application development agency.
Dead before it's finished: nobody reads it in full, it freezes choices too early, and it bills months of scoping before any result. One clear spec page is enough to start.
The bigger the scope, the longer, costlier, and riskier. A first brick running in two weeks teaches you more than six months of meetings.
A screen is simple to display; what can be complex is the action it triggers. A good partner translates your need into the simplest solution that works, not everything you imagine.
The same trap eats many projects: see how to avoid the pit with a custom web application, or how SMBs replaced their spreadsheets in a business app for SMBs. For a concrete case, look at our custom software page.
If you re-enter data from one tool to another, if you rent an ERP or a SaaS you bend into a spreadsheet, or if no off-the-shelf software fits your business, custom is probably the right answer. Not a six-figure project: a concrete, bounded first brick, live in two weeks.