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 everything was more expensive to develop.  Even so, we always gravitated towards building high end, bespoke software that empowered our clients, rather than focusing on a business niche, or being tied into any platform.  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 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.
  
  
• They are frustrating and unrewarding to develop on, leading to a demoralised software team.  
  
  
• They force you to operate just how everyone else operates leaving less room for your ideas to provide unique value to your customers.

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 - AI (which we are already using and investing our energy in deeper integrations with our current systems of working) will undoubtedly provide another enormous step forwards in that evolution.

That ever narrowing gap, combined with the huge diversity of systems a bespoke system can be made to integrate 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.