By Artem Korsakov ·
A ready-made service or custom development must cover the business's mandatory actions, so you need to compare the entire workflow and support costs. If you only compare the user interface and initial price, it is easy to underestimate manual workarounds for a ready-made product or the ongoing support required for your own solution.
A ready-made service is reasonable to check first when the task is standard. Custom development should be considered if important process rules do not fit into available tools or if differences affect customer interactions. This is a way to validate a solution before making large commitments; it is not a universal rule for saving money.
Separate Mandatory Actions from Habits
Write down several outcomes without which the process cannot function. For example, a client submits an application with documents, a specialist returns comments, and a manager approves the result. Then separately indicate habitual status names, button locations, and internal table features.
A ready-made service might name a stage differently while preserving the necessary meaning. Ordering custom development solely for familiar field placement is usually difficult to justify. However, if a product does not allow restricting access to documents for another organization, this is a significant limitation that cannot be fixed by training. Such segregation is discussed in the article about the client portal.
Test a Ready Product on an End-to-End Example
In a hypothetical company, advertising materials are approved with multiple clients. On a demo of a ready-made service, it is convenient to comment on the layout. However, the company also needs to separate documents for different organizations and save the approved version. These actions must be performed on test data; a general description of features is insufficient.
Add an exception: the client changes approved materials after approval. Look at how the new version is reflected and who receives a notification. One such check is more useful than a long comparison of feature names, as it shows the impact of constraints on actual responsibility.
Compare Costs Over an Identical Period
Account for the total costs of each option:
- ready-made service: subscription, paid roles, setup, data migration, and manual actions that will remain;
- custom development: creation, hosting, maintenance, training, and future changes.
An example of such a calculation for a personal portal is available in the article “How much does a client’s personal portal cost”.
Comparing one-time development costs with a monthly subscription without specifying the usage period tells you nothing about the total cost.
You can make a hypothetical time calculation. If an employee spends ten minutes working around a limitation and repeats the action six times a day, that is one hour of work daily. However, before drawing financial conclusions, you must confirm the frequency on a real process. Do not turn an occasional inconvenience into permanent savings on paper.
Custom Development Means Your Own Support
A custom solution allows you to describe access rights, actions, and integration with other systems more accurately. Along with this, the business makes decisions about development and pays for necessary changes. The absence of a subscription from an external product does not mean the absence of regular expenses.
Before starting work, determine who approves changes and verifies the result. You need access rights, operation documentation, and a clear procedure for transferring to another provider. Dependence on a specific person can also arise with custom development if knowledge about the system's operation remains only with the author.
An Intermediate Option is Possible
Sometimes a ready-made service covers the main work, while a separate interface is needed for clients or one specific stage. This combination can preserve useful standard features. However, data exchange and license restrictions must be evaluated separately; otherwise, an intermediate solution will become two weakly connected systems.
Do not assemble a complex chain just to avoid custom development. If every change requires workarounds in several places, evaluate the maintainability of the entire stack. User simplicity must be accompanied by clear operation for the team.
How to Make a Decision
Compare both options using identical data, roles, and exceptions. Record where the ready product matches the process, where a compromise is needed, and what it costs. For custom development, request an evaluation of the remaining gap specifically.
If mandatory actions proceed without critical limitations, a ready-made service may be sufficient. If not, the validation materials will become a substantive task for custom development. The process description and test results can be passed to trike_dev, and the decision discussed with clear boundaries. An example of a custom solution can be seen in the client portal demo.
Частые вопросы ### What if a ready-made service covers almost everything?
An intermediate option is possible: a ready-made service for the main work and a separate interface for clients or one special stage. Data exchange and license restrictions in such cases must be evaluated separately.