Your idea is different. So why base your software using a cookie-cutter approach? Learn how custom software development can help your business and how much it will cost to get there.
As enthusiastic business owners, we all want to be unique and exclusive, the opposite of off-the-shelf, mass-produced.
If you are using the same software solutions as your competitors, securing your competitive edge becomes increasingly difficult.
It’s all about diving into an ocean of opportunities and expanding your vision of what’s actually possible. Especially in periods of growth, inefficiencies and problems reveal themselves, and you can’t afford this to slow you down.
A custom software approach can help you close skills gaps, reduce costs, accelerate deployment, and stand out from the competition. It’s a tailor-made technology solution bringing innovative, scalable, and competitive results, maximizing your resources through affordable and dependable development and understanding that speed to market has become a critical factor for success.
In this article, we’ll look at:
What is custom software development?
What custom software development can do for your business?
How much does custom software development cost?
What goes into developing custom software?
What to expect in the process?
Is custom software development for you?
What is custom software development?
Custom software development creates user-friendly solutions with a company’s infrastructure, branding, and implementation needs to work only for that organization providing the flexibility to solve unique and complex issues and transform ideas into streamlined processes that drive growth.
It facilitates content management, customer relationships, automation systems, web portals, e-commerce solutions, bug-tracking, security, and more, all while striving for visual appeal and ease of use without being locked into a template with limited customization.
Dedicated groups of highly skilled and creative programmers perform in-depth product analyses and solve technological challenges through management, support, and expertise.
In recent years, custom software solutions have deservedly increased their market share because of the incredible value to users. When you custom build software, you start from a clean slate, and you can optimize every process without compromising on anything, meeting every process need and nuance.
This approach considers specific goals and requirements that give your business a strategic advantage and revolutionizes your ways of working to become more productive and effective using the most creative and complex, adaptable software solutions —imagine the possibilities!
What custom software can do for your business?
Custom software provides things beyond the scope of what off-the-shelf software was created to provide, like extra security, database flexibility, or graphical capabilities.
Every business is unique, and it is hard to find a one-size-fits-all software solution. Targeted solutions give room to grow and ensure that you will have enough opportunities to include reliable options into the software for scalability, even in the developmental stage.
For a business, a custom approach builds intelligent and low-friction digital solutions to automate manual and inefficient business processes that translate into enhanced personalization, cost-effective solutions, improved sales, increased customer satisfaction, and also:
- Smoother growth transition
- Internal organization, consistency, and efficiency
- Improve streamlined information sharing and workflows
- Better customer experience
- Access to opportunities to expand into new markets
- Increase data availability and improve ease of reporting
Custom software development allows you to imagine, execute, and accelerate your digital transformation journey through new digital products that meet at the intersection of market opportunity, customer experience, and emerging technology.
A custom approach also keeps you ahead of the curve. As industries change and your company grows or downsizes, you’ll likely need to make adjustments to your software. You may need to scale for more users without slowing down the system, delete certain obsolete features, add new features for new workflows, and so on, and this is a benefit that comes with customization.
Now, you know this all sounds too good to be true, and you’re probably asking yourself: how much is all this going to cost?
We hate to say it, but it really depends.
How much does custom software development cost?
The cost of custom software development ranges from $40,000 to $250,000.
The best way to understand the broad range of custom software development costs is to dive deeper into what it takes to get there.
No two custom-built applications are the same, and that’s the beauty of it. Several different factors stack up to determine the bespoke software development cost.
Regardless of the location and level of expertise of the developers you hire, several key things will determine the eventual cost of your software:
The complexity of your software
There are two types of project complexity: intrinsic and extrinsic. Both types impact your budget and timeline.
Intrinsic software complexity is how difficult it is to solve your problem. The more intrinsically complex, the more analysis, planning, coding, and testing it will require, translating into higher expenses, especially when complex processes need to perform under user-friendly conditions.
Extrinsic complexity comes from the developers’ side and involves how good they are at solving your problem using a clean architecture and effective tools that simplify the code.
Tip: Consider what major functionalities do you need? This will allow you to look at the bigger picture and set clear expectations from the beginning that will enable you to prevent delays and reach a closer estimate of the cost of your project when it’s time to budget.
The size of your software:
The more screens/pages you have, the more work it requires to build your application, and the more expensive it will be to deliver.
A screen constitutes each unique screen behind every button click, link click, or menu click. Each time a page refreshes or changes, or a user clicks to a different page, that counts as a new screen.
Small projects range from 10-25 screens, medium are in the realm of 25-40, and large is anything more than 40.
Tip: Consider how many screens do you think your software will need?
Creative design expectations
Creative concept development and execution, including animations and user experience, complex and custom UI elements that make your software visually appealing require more time and effort, thus higher budgets. This factor will bear more importance depending on who the end-user is.
Tip: Consider the importance of front-end design in your application and allocate the time and consideration for design development in your budget.
System integrations
Integrating your custom software with several external software can make things even more complex, especially if they require API programming or migration of database data. While some integrations such as PayPal are seamless, older or lesser-known systems may increase the project cost.
Tip: Consider how many other systems your application needs to share data with?
Data migration
Nobody wants to leave valuable data in an old system and start with an empty new system. Moving data is a journey and, unfortunately, not an easy task beyond “export and import.” It involves a complex activity deserving a specific plan, approach, budget, and team.
If you have existing data that you want to transfer into your new software,
and it’s not possible to move by hand; this requires data migration to aid the transfer process and adjust it to fit into your new system.
Tip: Consider how you’ll need data migration for your project, and do not underestimate the complexity of the data migration process.
Delivery timeline
Time is of the essence, especially in a highly competitive and fast-paced technology-evolving space. If you wish to shorten development time, you will have to pay more to complete it within the time frame you want.
No two projects are alike or take the same amount of time to build, but in general, when planning and estimating a project timeline, you can consider:
- Requirements & Design
- Planning, Architecture & Development
- Software Testing
Tip: Consider the necessary deployment time of your project, and don’t forget to take into account a pre-production planning and research phase that will depend on the scope of your system.
What goes into developing custom web or mobile apps?
Uncovering deep insights about your customers, identifying touchpoints, and using efficient methodologies to drive specific results is a discovery process that leads to design and development. Yet, there is so much more to consider.
Let’s take a deeper look into the different stages of custom software development:
Stage 1: Innovation
Whether it’s self-driving cars or an app to get your food delivered, it’s impressive to think that humans brought those innovations to life.
Big ideas and even greater solutions begin with an open mindset involving human-centered partnerships, extensive qualitative research, data collection, and honest input from every stakeholder in the organization.
To deliver product expectations and goals, ambitious timelines, and constraints, it’s imperative to understand market opportunities, uncover customer motivations, and validate the product direction.
This innovation stage involves concept development, usability testing, and continuous iterations of these concepts.
Stage 2: Agile Development
Custom software development usually involves design thinking and psychology-infused research practices based on agile methodologies: build, test, deliver, assess, improve.
Agile methodology is a philosophy that enables a highly technical collaboration which encourages developers to spend more time designing in faster, optimized ways, usually considered sprints or cycles of development. This approach has taken over the waterfall era methodology with a new set of workflow principles designed for flexibility and adaptability, two important concepts in today’s fast-evolving world.
This team effort approach helps maximize efficiency, minimize setbacks, and increase speed to market, building a road map for functional, scalable front-end and back-end systems.
Stage 3: Update Redesign Strategy
In many cases, custom software developments occur when a product is already built.
Artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, machine learning (ML), cloud hosting, automation, and digitalization are updates that help modernize your existing software and prevent your brand from getting stuck in the past, enabling flexibility and agility for the digital age.
A digital transformation that enhances your capabilities provides a wide array of benefits, including increasing efficiency and ROI, improving integrations, and optimizing user experiences.
If you haven’t invested in modernization yet, you’re doing your competitors a favor. Why give them the edge you could keep for yourself instead?
Stage 4: Digitalization
Building intelligent and low friction solutions result from the entire research and development process, providing ways to deliver faster, more efficient, and accurate technologies that satisfy the fast-evolving digital expectations of users.
Digital transformation used to be optional. Not anymore.
Significant opportunities are being created by new technologies – in particular with cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence that present both challenges and opportunities for businesses to reach new markets, solve problems, and ultimately thrive.
For businesses, embracing the accelerating digitalization is a matter of survival, even if it comes at the cost of short-term disruption. There is no opt-out, and the alternative is to risk staying in the game.
Stage 5: Data and Analysis
In order to keep up with the competitive environment, software development also looks towards streamlining the process through comprehensive data analysis of trends, A/B testing, and consumer reports.
These practices help discover useful information for business decision-making with insight to deepen the understanding of consumers, identify product improvement opportunities, seek data monetization possibilities, and minimize costs.
Stage 6: Emerging Tech
Technology moves fast, and those who stay up to date with the latest emerging technologies and find ways to adapt to change are more likely to achieve success. This is why the software development process is ongoing, continuous, and ever-changing.
For virtually every business, staying on top of emerging technologies is key when delivering custom software solutions that meet your customer’s exact needs. These include artificial intelligence (AI), automation, robotization, cryptocurrencies, The Internet of Things (IoT), voice recognition, and more.
What to expect in the process?
You’ve come this far, now what’s next? The custom software process starts with a vision and goals, building a system iteratively, and ends up with something you probably didn’t envision at the beginning of the process, even if you thought you knew exactly what you wanted.
It’s not just the solution that’s custom but also the entire process, from beginning to end.
For those who’ve never experienced it, here are four things to expect in the custom software development process:
- Custom software development is a continuous learning experience: you will learn about your company, industry, and even yourself. Having the right development partner that can guide you through the process can make all the difference.
- Many things can change along the way: custom software development is built for change adaptation, so much so that the principal project management methodology used for software projects —agile—is explicitly designed to respond to change more fluidly.
- Custom software development is an ongoing commitment: ongoing investment in building, continually improving, and enhancing a system is included in the journey: hosting, third party integrations, licensing fees, support, enhancements, proactive diagnostics are some of the continuous support your software will need for the long term.
- Custom software development is a collaborative effort: a custom solution requires experts and trustworthy development partners, usually outsourced, that can support you and the software they develop over the long term. Eventually, they can gradually transition support to an in-house team if that’s what makes sense for your business.
For an awesome guide on selecting a company to work with you check out this guide on how to choose a software developer in the USA.
Is custom software right for you?
The big question: is a custom software development approach the right choice for your business?
Building a custom software from the ground up, with no preconceived design, and with each feature created explicitly for the needs of a particular project is a very in-depth process, uniquely individual, that requires research and time.
Often businesses will turn to an off-the-shelf software solution because it appears to be the faster and more affordable option.
However, the limitations of this software can result in more costs and time spent attempting to add required features and functionality to fit specific needs.
What works best for one business doesn’t necessarily work for another. Software that is developed exclusively for your business ensures that all of your activities and processes are appropriately addressed and automated to meet your goals.
While the price mark for custom software might seem like a big expense upfront, there are many other long-term factors to consider that may show that custom software is a reasonable and necessary investment.
Some of the benefits of investing in developing custom software include:
- Supporting productivity and efficiency
- Automation of key process
- Highly structured lead management activities
- Improved security
- Real-time intelligence for better decision making
- Smooth scalability without incurring additional costs
- Lower integration costs
- Licensing or sell out opportunities
- Independence from price increases for licensing and support from vendors
As you can see, custom software development focuses on a tailored outcome-oriented approach. It’s the chance to create something unique for forward-thinking businesses seeking to accelerate growth and become technology leaders, especially if even a little amount of uncertainty is associated with your business.
Your business needs to scale, innovate, and differentiate. Don’t let technology hold you back.
Ready to execute your vision and deliver cutting-edge software to your users? Make your software architecture adapt to changing business goals with a secure, flexible, and efficient team of developers that meets your needs.
