When you’ve decided that you need custom software for your company, no matter what swayed you - scalability, personal approach, security, or flexibility of this solution, - you will stumble upon the issue of cost. 

Custom software is not cheap, that's true. But is it really expensive? Let’s look at the alternatives and compare them. 

First of all, you can accept defeat and opt for the off-the-shelf solution. If you are persistent enough and chose to go for custom software, after all, you have two options - prioritize results that affect bottom-line in the short term, or look embrace the process and patiently wait for the expensive but pitch-perfect product. This choice can be a minefield. Let’s have a look at why’s and how’s.

Cheap and fast can’t be good

Managers make short-term investment decisions for many reasons. Sometimes they're trying to meet short-term objectives, such as improving their quarterly profits, which seems to be a more urgent goal than investing for the long term. Besides, two years from now, they may be long gone and the health of the firm will be somebody else's problem. For years, consulting companies and IT startups have been outsourcing parts of the software development cycle offshore to freelancers, often – in third-world countries. It’s cheap and simple. And it promises lots of trouble.

If you try to take shortcuts to get the results you want without doing the slow work, it takes more time to get the software systems that you want, be it simple databases for your plumbing shop or a national network of car dealerships. It would take time for the local development team to research the way you do business, some even visit your premises to do that and to design and develop your software. But when it’s ready – you’re set to go and do your thing without worrying if anything will go wrong (and if it does – you have a place to go for help).

That is why slow is fast. Fast is slow and never good.

Custom software demands clear communication, strategy, transparent testing, quality assurance standards to deliver a reliable, accessible, and stable. What goes into it and why it takes so long? The following influences the speed and the cost of software:

• Software Size
• Software flexibility
• Software Complexity
• Past data migration
• Testing and security measures
• Creative Design
• Integration with other Systems

Can an offshore software development company that prioritizes volume over quality delivers any of the above? Highly unlikely.

In that case, where should that responsible IT manager go?

Choose local

How should you strike the balance between going bankrupt and getting a good piece of software? How should you not end up in a situation like Boeing, who paid a horrible price for their cheapness? Stop reading here and drop Tentacle Solutions an email and we will take it from there. With twenty years of experience in bespoke database software development in the UK and EU, Tentacle’s team knows all the ins and outs, all the risks, and the ways to mitigate, all the strings attached to software development.

First, let’s establish the difference between the “price” and the “cost”. For example, buying the $199 laptop may seem like a good, quick investment. But the fact that it would get super slow in two weeks and breaks in 6 months means it was a waste of $199. Buying a well-researched computer for $600 that has a history of longevity and lasts you 5 years is a fantastic buy. The same basic principles apply to software development. Boeing didn’t adhere to this rule of thumb and paid for it with both its share value in billions and what’s worse - with the lives of its customers.

Long story short, Boeing's managers decided to outsource software engineering cycle to an offshore software developer and lower the hourly pay from around $50/hr to $9/hr – may seem smart and cheap, since the bottom line is everything. Turned out the offshore developers had much lower testing and quality assurance standards than Boeing and worked extremely inefficiently since the management prioritized fast delivery over the quality end result. Naturally, the vital piloting systems failed mid-flight due to untested software bugs and two planes went down, taking three hundred lives. That is the cost of cheap solutions.

It doesn’t have to be that dramatic for everyone, but in the age of Big Data, privacy issues, stolen identities, selling private information and GDPR to control it all, hiring offshore developers for the cheapness sake and turning a blind eye to the standards of quality and security quickly becomes a very expensive solution.

The Damocles Recession

We are in the midst of a recession, that is not speculation of financial forecasting at this point - that is a fact. Covid19 has sped up what was forecasted for a long time and now businesses and workers face a lot of tough decisions. It adds another dimension to the issue of costs of custom software and cloud solutions.

Cutting your spending may seem intuitive, but a huge number of companies that lived through recessions have understood that protecting their workforce, managing the top line, and optimizing their business processes are all vital to surviving any crisis. But how do you do that?

Harvard Business Review advises going simultaneously on defense and on offense. We at Tentacle can’t argue with that. First, begin with aggressive moves to reduce costs and increase efficiency. How much of your company’s paperwork and data management is done by hand or in an old Access database? That’s a waste of time and resources that robs your company of flexibility and adaptability that are essential in times of crisis. Tentacle’s clients could easily prioritize the health and safety of their employees and clients just because they had a custom cloud-based SQL database that allowed them to work-from-home and working remotely without losing any efficiency.

Getting a new IT infrastructure via a cloud-based database might seem like a huge and long-term investment. But waiting to move forward with updating your IT infrastructure and optimizing your business processes via cloud-based solutions may compromise your ability to capitalize on opportunities when the economy rebounds. And the cost of these investments will be lower now, as competition for resources slackens.

The other option is to follow the majority of business and turn to conservatism, talk of “caring about clients and workers” and at the same time laying people off, borrowing money, and ultimately closing down because of ineffective reactive measures that buried their company into the ground. Those people consider spending lots of money on preventive measures like updating your systems and optimizing the workflow an “aggressive” step.

As a result of this “aggressive” step - the update of an old database or getting a completely new, bespoke system, - you can preserve your employees, increase your efficiency, add flexibility and reactivity to your business model. And most importantly - survive any crisis.