Bespoke Software

When we started out 2 decades ago, the world of web development was an entirely different proposition - everything took more effort to achieve, and thus functionality was more expensive to develop.  Even so, we always gravitated towards building high end, bespoke software that empowered a wide range of clients, rather than focusing on a single business vertical, or being tied into any platform we couldn't control.  Instead we built tools that helped us achieve rapid development, in order to keep costs low enough so that non-corporate businesses could build the websites they needed to power their organisation.

We’ve always kept faith with that concept, right the way through the changing landscape of the years in which we’ve been trading.  And while off-the-shelf tools and services become ever more sophisticated the central tenets of the argument against them has never changed; 

• They make your business compromise and fit to the way they have been designed - completely cutting you out of the loop of one of the most empowering rewards of running a business.  
  
  
• They provide everything to everyone - there’s almost always huge amounts of functionality in the system that you don’t use or want, leading to heavy administrative burdens full of risk of misuse.
  
  
• They are inflexible - small changes can cost enormous amounts of time and money, and sometimes a change is simply not possible. 
  
  
• They can rarely cope with a large business pivot.
  
  
• When engineering even partially sophisticated functionality, they are frustrating and unrewarding to develop on, leading to a demoralised software team.  In addition, truly talented developers will almost certainly opt to work somewhere they have a lot of control and say about how they work.
  
  
• They force you to operate using the same methodology as everyone else, with a very low bar of entry to potential competition - leaving less room for your ideas to provide unique value to your customers, and less opportunity to build success over the long run by truly differentiating your business.

Simply put they are not designed around you and your needs, but are trying to be a catch all for as wide a market segment as they can get away with.

What off-the-shelf systems do have however, and what bespoke software development will always struggle to compete against, is a natural cost efficiency.  But over time, as the software tools (and our own skills) have matured, the gap between the cost of delivering bespoke software compared to an off the shelf service with a never ending monthly fee is ever narrowing.  And it will continue to narrow - LLMs (or AI as they are known), which we have aggressively adopted, has undoubtedly provided another enormous step forwards in that evolution. 

The ever narrowing price differential, combined with the huge diversity of systems a bespoke system can now be easily integrated with, is leading in our opinion to a golden age of bespoke systems, where you can afford to directly dictate the way your software and website operates.