Customers often ask, “Why are custom software solutions so expensive?”. The short answer is, “Because there is a lot of work that goes into creating a custom software application.”
As part of our company philosophy to be open to all of our prospective clients, we want to take this time to educate you on the custom software process. Note: There are some unspoken assumptions here which we won’t get into, to keep this discussion relatively brief. So, please don’t flame us for not including various aspects of a scenario that you might run into.
Creating custom software applications, like designing a custom-built home, takes hours of a professional’s time. The time required to create those features is based upon two primary factors:
1) the number and complexity of features requested for the software
2) the variety of tasks required to create those features
The first step in creating a custom software application is to Define the Requirements. This can be questions such as: Do you want screens in the application? How many do you want? What will they do? You want reports? How many reports, what will the reports display, how many columns, do you want to enter dates and/or select single client to limit the data in that report? What about security? Where the database will be installed? Training and documentation? Who will install? How will we make future updates, etc.?
Each requirement has to be documented before any work can begin. The next steps is to design the requirements so that our experienced, talented software programmers know what to create. They create each feature from scratch, so that the application is exclusively customized to the customer’s business.
After the application has been created, we test the whole application to kingdom-come to make sure it works as intended. Often times, clients the request that we write technical documentation/user documentation, train the users and install the software.
Wow! It’s a lot of work, isn’t it? It’s easy to see how a lot of hours can be clocked when creating a custom application. It’s a unique solution for a unique situation, so it must be created from scratch.
However, once the software is created – it will do exactly what you want it to do, and often pay for itself within months.
Modifying an existing custom software application can be a similar situation. How well was the application built? How much of it do you want to modify? Does what looks like one small change reach into many other parts of the application, requiring changes in many other places? It often does. Then all of those changes have to be tested. And we hope we don’t turn up some new bugs in the process which we couldn’t possibly have identified before.
No matter how you slice it, custom software can end up being a costly project. But, in the end you’ll end up with exactly what you wanted doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
Contact us for a customized estimate.
Focused custom solutions