Web applications9 min
Custom software development for a small business: when it beats SaaS, and when it doesn't
Custom software development for a small business: the three cases where it beats SaaS, how a build runs in 4 to 8 weeks, and who owns the code.
Last winter a scaffolding contractor from Gémenos, just outside Marseille, came to see me with a folder of invoices, because he wanted to know whether custom software development would work out cheaper than the app he was already paying for and he thought we might as well check it on paper. He had twenty-four seats at 39 € a seat per month, and his foremen used two screens of it, the daily site report and the hours, while the office did its planning in it and kept everything else in Excel. So he was paying for a lot of things nobody opened.
What I told him is what I end up telling most people who ask, although it usually takes me longer to get there than it did with him, because he had the folder. If you are paying per seat for a crowd of people who each use one screen, custom software will usually come out cheaper over a few years. Same if the way you work is really the thing your customers pay for and every product you've tried needs a spreadsheet next to it to cope. Same again if your data sits in four or five places and somebody spends hours each week moving it around by hand.
Outside of those three I'd keep paying for the subscription, which is what I ended up telling about a third of the people who called me about this last year.
Three situations where the subscription loses
Paying per seat for people who use one screen
He didn't mind paying for the two seats in the office, since the people doing the planning are in the app all day. The other twenty-two seats were for the men on the scaffolding, who as far as he could see opened it twice a day to check in and send a photo, and he was paying 39 € a month for each of them. When the contract renewed in January it went up 12%, and he was told that wasn't negotiable for a customer his size.
That kind of increase has been happening to everyone. Vertice, which tracks what companies pay for software, measured SaaS inflation at 16.4% in June 2026, which they say is almost four times US consumer inflation, and Microsoft put the list price of Microsoft 365 Business Standard up from $12.50 to $14 per user per month on July 1, 2026.
On one seat a few euros more doesn't seem like much, but he had twenty-four seats and he plans to run the business for at least another ten years, so we multiplied it out over five years together on the back of one of the invoices.
When your process is what you sell
A fish wholesaler at Saumaty, the fishing port in the north of Marseille, had a different kind of problem, because he sells fish before it's caught. Restaurants send him their orders the night before, the boats come in between four and five, and by about six he has to split what came in. The morning I went down there that meant eleven kilos of red mullet for nineteen kilos of orders, and he shares it out by rules he's used for years, regulars first.
He had already tried two order-management products. Both of them wanted a stock quantity before they would take an order, and he doesn't have a stock quantity until the boats are in, so both times he went back to his notebook.
So we built him something small, five screens in all, where the restaurants keep a standing order on their phone and somebody on the quay enters what was landed. The app then suggests a split using his rules and he adjusts it if he wants to before the confirmations are sent, which takes him about ten minutes instead of the hour it used to. I did spend a couple of days looking for a product that already worked this way first, and I couldn't find one.
Five tools and one person copying between them
A wedding caterer near Aix had the opposite problem, which was too much software. She had separate tools for inquiries, quotes, kitchen quantities, staffing and accounting, and the guest count for a wedding changes about eight times between the first quote and the week of the event, so each change had to be typed in four places by hand. Once the allergen list didn't get from the quote to the kitchen. It was a nut allergy and the kitchen caught it while plating, and she called me the week after.
She'd tried to connect the tools with Zapier before she called me, and by then there were fourteen zaps, and every few weeks one of them would stop working and nobody would notice for a while. In the end we kept her accounting and staffing apps and replaced the rest with one event file, and since some of her returning clients now log in to see theirs, it has more or less turned into a small client portal.
Keep the subscription
For accounting, payroll and email I'd always keep the subscription, and usually for the CRM too if it's just two salespeople using it. The companies behind those products have spent years on problems you haven't had yet, so if I built you your own version you'd be paying me to have them all over again. Last spring a physio practice in Ceyreste asked me for an appointment booking system, and I pointed them to a booking app at about 40 € a month and didn't charge for the call.
And sometimes it isn't a software problem at all. An insurance broker in Aubagne asked me last year for an application to copy claim emails into his broker software, and I ended up setting him up with an AI agent that reads them and fills in the fields, for well under a fifth of the price, and I go into that kind of case in the post on AI agents for business owners.
How a build runs, week by week
Most builds take somewhere between four and eight weeks, and I spend the first day of every one of them wherever the work actually happens. On the scaffolding job that meant the yard in Gémenos at a quarter past six in the morning, about twenty minutes from my bench in La Ciotat, in the south of France, and for clients further away it means a plane ticket.
I learned a couple of things that morning. About half the foremen leave their phone in the cab until the first break, and most of them fill in the daily report at around four in the afternoon from memory, so the real-time updates the office had asked for didn't make much sense, and we dropped them and spent the time on a form that takes less than a minute to fill in with gloves on.
Weeks two and three are a mockup you can click through with fake data in it, and for the caterer that meant her head chef and two of her waiters going through a fake wedding of 140 guests on a tablet in the kitchen. They found eleven things I'd gotten wrong, and each of them cost me an hour or two to fix at that stage, where later on it would have been a week.
After that I build it in pieces, and every Friday there's a version they can use, even if it's fairly rough to begin with. The foremen got theirs in week four with three fields and a photo button, and the first thing they asked for was bigger text.
One thing went wrong, and it was mobile coverage, which I hadn't asked about. There's no 4G at all on the north side of a building they were scaffolding in La Ciotat, so in week five I had to make the form keep reports on the phone and send them later, once there was a connection again.
For the last two weeks the old system and the new one run side by side, and the subscription only gets canceled on a date agreed at the start, which in Gémenos was the first of April. If you're not sure yet whether you need an application at all, the guide to custom web application development goes through that question.
Who owns the code, and the data
The client should own it, and that's in my contracts. When the scaffolding app was handed over, the code went into a repository under the company's own account and the database and hosting were put in their name. They also got the admin passwords and a twelve-page document on how it's put together. Some agencies sell custom software that really runs on their own platform, and when you leave them you only get a CSV export, so get it in writing.
With a subscription you're renting, which is fine until the vendor decides to change the terms. Atlassian stopped supporting its Server products on February 15, 2024, and companies that had run Jira on their own servers for years had to move to the cloud or to Data Center, or carry on with no support.
Owning it does cost something every month, and I always say so early. For an application this size it's usually between 100 and 300 € for hosting, backups, security updates and the occasional fix, and the fish wholesaler pays about 120 € while the scaffolding company pays 180 €.
What custom software development costs against a subscription
The scaffolding app came to 11,800 € before VAT, which is nearly 3,000 € above the 9,000 € that the studio's web applications start at, mostly because it had two kinds of user and had to talk to their payroll software. I've gone through what moves the price in the article on custom software development cost.
They had been paying 936 € a month in seats before the January increase, so with 180 € a month to run the new app it paid for itself in about fifteen and a half months.
My only advice if you run the numbers yourself is to do it over five years and put the renewal increases in. If you'd rather go through them with someone, you can book a fifteen-minute call, and there are a few of my previous projects on the portfolio page.
FAQ
Is custom software worth it for a small business?
In my experience it's worth it when you're paying per seat for a lot of people who each use one screen, like the twenty-two men on scaffolding above. It can also be worth it when your way of working is what customers pay for, or when somebody spends hours each week copying data from one tool to another, but for accounting, payroll or email I'd keep the subscription.
How much does custom software development cost for a small business?
At Studio Calanque a web application starts at 9,000 € before VAT, delivered in four to eight weeks, and the scaffolding app in this article came to 11,800 €. Hosting and maintenance add 100 to 300 € a month after that.
Custom software vs SaaS: which is cheaper?
If you only look at one year, the subscription nearly always comes out cheaper. Over five years it depends on the number of seats, and for the scaffolding company twenty-four seats at 39 € a month added up to 56,160 € before any increase, while the build plus five years of upkeep came to roughly 22,600 €.