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Custom Build or SaaS Platform?
By Sithabile Mkhize
Have you ever had to decide whether to build custom software or buy an existing SaaS solution? It’s a critical choice that impacts your budget, launch timeline, and business operation.
The difference between custom software and SaaS
Let’s start by defining the two solutions.
A custom software solution entails building your software from the ground up. It requires collaboration between the relevant business stakeholders who provide the vision, budget and strategy behind the solution, and the technical teams who implement and build the solution.
A Software as a Service (SaaS) solution is a third-party, cloud-based platform that offers ready-to-use software managed by a vendor. The vendor manages the responsibilities of underlying infrastructure, hosting, maintenance, and new feature development. The customer integrates with the service through a subscription.
We can already deduce that these are two very different paths and that the choice will affect whether you meet your business objectives or not.
Before we decide on the winning choice, let’s unpack a few factors that we need to consider before deciding.
Key Factors to Consider
Here are a few factors to consider before deciding which option to choose:
1. Speed to Market
It is important to figure out your ideal project timeline and when you foresee your users onboarding onto your final product. Building requires comprehensive planning, identifying the requirements and scope before going into development and testing, which usually requires a minimum of a few months. When choosing a SaaS solution, integration and setup is relatively quick which means faster time to market.
2. Costs
Building software means having a budget that will cover hosting infrastructure, a development team, third-party API’s, software licenses and development environments.
A SaaS platform is usually up and running and only requires a subscription that is either fixed or uses a pay-as-you-go model. The SaaS subscription cost is likely to increase as you scale your business.
3. Talent/Resources
Building software requires the talent/teams that have the expertise to successfully develop your envisioned product.
Buying a SaaS generally does not require development teams since it’s a ready to use product.
4. Maintenance
With your own custom-built software, the responsibility of maintenance falls on you to ensure it remains operational and secure.
With a SaaS solution, your chosen vendor manages the maintenance of the product, but you are your user’s first point of call when they need to raise support issues.
When it makes sense to buy
It is advisable to buy an established SaaS solution if it acts as a support to your processes and isn’t the core of your offering. Integration with an existing e-commerce platform, for example, can speed up your launch date, reduce the need to have a technical team for setting up your ecommerce site, take away the responsibility of maintenance, reduce risk by it having a pay-as-you-go or fixed subscription rate and provide a third-party supported end-to-end system that handles product catalogue display, online payments and delivery.
Using a tried and tested SaaS vendor can also build trust with your customers because it gives them an assurance that they are purchasing from a reputable ecommerce site.
When it makes sense to build
The following are all plausible reasons to build your own site. SaaS solutions may have functional limitations that do not have sustainable workarounds. When you need your online store to have custom workflows, or you prefer to maintain your own infrastructure. If you do not want to pay SaaS platform fees that are ongoing.
Another argument for building can be if you need your online store to be the core of your business operations and you prefer to have more control over development and maintenance.
Conclusion, which option is better?
There is no perfect answer to the question of whether building or buying is better. What is advisable is to identify what your business needs and strategy are. And then to choose a path that will enable you to achieve your business goals.