Product
Why we stopped selling custom builds
5 min read
For years we priced the work the way software houses do: a discovery, a quote, a build, a handover. It produced systems that did exactly what the brief asked for, and it produced the usual aftermath — a codebase nobody wanted to own, a change request for every new field, a team waiting on us to move a threshold.
We stopped selling that. Not because custom work is dishonest, but because most of what our customers needed was the same system configured differently, and charging them as if it were unique was making both sides worse at the job.
What the old model got wrong
A custom build is paid for once and then starts decaying. The customer's process moves; the software does not, unless someone pays again. The people who understood the original brief leave. Eighteen months later the system is a constraint rather than a tool, and the next conversation is about replacing it.
It also selected for the wrong conversations. We spent the first months of every project arguing about screens instead of about the decision the screen was supposed to support.
What the subscription is actually for
The platform is the parts that are the same: a portal for the applicant, a back office for the team, dashboards, and the integrations that regulated work depends on. Your products, your rules, your approval levels, your documents — those are configuration. Changing them is part of the subscription, not a change request.
Custom features still exist. If you need something the platform does not do, we will build it and price it separately. The difference is that this is now the exception, and it is named as one, rather than the default way of working.
What we would not do again
- Start a project without writing the process as states rather than screens
- Quote a build against a brief that has not been run past the people who do the work
- Hand over a system and leave the configuration to a team that has never seen it
- Treat every request as unique when most of them are a field and a rule
Have a system exactly as you envision it
Let's talk. It's time to make a better version of your business.