A charity asked me this week why I'd quote a bespoke build when there are platforms in their sector you can configure and go.
The platform is cheaper on the invoice. That's usually where the comparison stops, and it's the wrong place to stop it, because the expensive part of a badly fitting platform never turns up on the invoice.
The gap doesn't show up in the demo
In a demo you watch somebody who knows the product drive it down a path it was designed for. Everything fits, because you're being shown the parts that fit.
The gap between what the software does and what you do only appears when your staff put your work through it, in volume, on a wet Tuesday in November. The child whose situation doesn't map to any of the categories. The measure your funder defines differently to the vendor. The approval step that has to happen in a different order because of who's in the building that day.
By the time you can see the gap, you've already moved
Six months in, you've changed things to suit the software. Forms redesigned around its fields. Reporting rebuilt around what its export gives you. People trained on it. Real data in it.
That leaves three options, and all of them cost money.
- Pay for customisation. You're now funding a bespoke build anyway, on somebody else's timeline, at their rate, inside their architecture.
- Put up with it. The cost doesn't disappear, it moves onto your staff, where nobody measures it.
- Start again. Write off the licence money and all the change effort that went with it.
None of those is a catastrophe on its own. What makes it expensive is that all three cost more than getting the decision right at the start, and you can't tell which one you're heading for until you're already committed.
"Built for the sector" usually means built for the middle of it
A sector platform is built for the median organisation in that sector. That's a sensible commercial decision. It's often a bad bet for a charity, because plenty of charities exist precisely because they do the thing the mainstream provider doesn't.
We work with a children's charity running specialist provision. They'd been down the configured-platform road before, on a product built for mainstream early years settings. It works fine for what it was built for. It just assumes a shape of organisation they aren't, and every assumption that was slightly off got absorbed by staff working round it.
What worries me about a configured platform isn't the licence fee. It's that you don't find out how big the gap is until you've already rebuilt the organisation around it.
The cost lands on people, not on a budget line
This is why the comparison looks so favourable to the platform right up until it doesn't. Licence fees are visible, agreed annually, and easy to defend. The workarounds are none of those things.
What they look like in practice:
- A spreadsheet bridging two systems that were both supposed to remove spreadsheets.
- The definition of a measure living inside a formula on a workbook tab that one person understands.
- A board report rebuilt by hand every month because the export is nearly right.
- Numbers that disagree between systems, and an afternoon spent working out which one to believe.
Nobody logs any of that as a cost of the software. It's just how the month goes.
What's different when the system is yours
The measures on the report are the ones your board asks about, defined once, in one place, and checked at the point somebody types them in. The cadences are yours. The thresholds are yours. When the trustees want to see something different in year two, that's a change request rather than an argument with somebody else's roadmap.
There's a second thing that only shows up later. If the same people built the two systems you eventually want talking to each other, joining them up is a piece of work rather than a project. Nobody has to reverse engineer somebody else's database first. There's no second supplier to agree an interface with and then bill you for the meetings about it. When a figure doesn't match, there's one person to ask.
When the platform is the right answer
Most of the time. Accounts, payroll, email, video calls, file storage, a standard fundraising CRM doing standard fundraising. If you do the job the way the rest of the sector does the job, buy the product and get on with your day. We say this to people who are half expecting us to quote for a build.
Custom starts to be worth the money when a few of these are true:
- The thing that makes you different is also the thing the software keeps getting wrong.
- You're paying for a large amount of product you don't use in order to get the bit you do.
- Someone says "if only it did X" most weeks, and X is the same X every time.
- Your reporting gets rebuilt by hand because no report in the product matches what your funders or trustees actually asked for.
- Your data is trapped somewhere you can't easily leave, and the renewal goes up every year.
How to test the fit before you sign anything
The demo won't tell you. These questions will, and they cost you nothing but an awkward half hour with the salesperson.
- Bring your three most awkward real cases, not the tidy one, and ask them to show you those in the product. If the answer is "you'd handle that outside the system", you've found a workaround before you've paid for it.
- Ask what happens when your definition of a measure differs from theirs. Can you change it, and does the change carry back through historic data?
- Ask what a change to a report costs, how long it takes, and who decides whether it happens at all. The last part matters most.
- Ask how you get your data out, in what format, and whether the relationships between records survive the export. "CSV" on its own is not a good answer.
- Then price the workarounds you found. Hours a month, times your staff cost, times three years. Put that number next to the licence fee and compare those two, not the licence fee on its own.
If the platform survives that, buy it. Plenty do. We'd rather you spent the money on the right thing than on us.
The short version
Configured platforms fail slowly and quietly, and they present the bill after you've already changed the organisation to suit them. That's the risk worth pricing, not the monthly fee.
We've written separately about why custom software got affordable enough to be a real option, and about the work we do with charities. If you're weighing up a platform at the moment and you want somebody to poke holes in it who isn't selling it to you, drop us a line. We'll tell you if the product is the better buy.