Why is it sometimes better to buy a ready-made software product than to develop your own

Even in that era when we were actively engaged in the development of sites, we had a strong desire to create our own web service, which will be better than all existing in this segment on the market. First of all, such a desire arose because all the products on the market did not satisfy our needs, and secondly, because of the not always objective assessment of our own capabilities.

So, in 2009, we developed our own city portal and started selling advertising on it. At first, there was only news and a catalog of organizations - and after a while we realized that we needed many more different services - announcements, a poster, etc. And here a problem arose - it turned out that it is not always possible to separate the time of programmers from commercial projects, and the development of new functions and sections is dragging on. Only by taking an individual person specifically for this project we were able to fully engage in its development - but the salary of this person was rather big.

After a couple of years, we realized that we needed a normal project management system and also decided to do our own, and again after a couple of months we came to the conclusion that for its further development and support we needed a separate person, and, in fact, a separate budget for his salary. After a couple of years, we decided to create a system to control the working hours of employees and again the story repeated.

All the systems developed by us still work with us, however, with changes within the company, new changes in these systems are also required, for which again it is necessary to allocate time for current employees or money for the salary of new specialists. Due to the fact that either one or the other was constantly lacking, the development of some of them almost completely stopped.

The only thing that we really support and develop is the city portal, which is one of the main sources of revenue for our company. However, having invested several tens of thousands of man-hours there in 7 years, I understand how much easier it would be to buy a ready-made solution that other people will develop and support.

In fact, everything rests precisely on support and development - products that do not change along with the market, the needs of users and customers, are doomed to disappear. In our rapidly changing world, even one year without any changes is already enough to begin to lag behind, and two or three years is already a serious gap. Therefore, when creating any product of your own, it is necessary to understand whether the capabilities will support it to the extent necessary for development or not.

The same is true for individual developments, which some companies order for themselves. The most important question is whether you or your developers will have the opportunity to maintain the project at the proper level? Due to the lack of understanding of this a few years ago, we made one large project, which is now being used at 10% of its capabilities only because it is not possible to allocate resources for at least some development and improvement.

Already, more and more companies are using SaaS services, and less or less are ordering or making their own projects. A cloud service, especially one whose developers use it themselves, is simply “doomed” to success, because its creators always keep up to date, understand the needs of the market and its users.

Therefore, we decided to focus on what we do best - on our city portal, which we have been doing for more than 6 years. Having prepared all the necessary components, we made the Gorodor franchise, within which we offer partners from other cities to use our product and our experience to launch their own city portal.

And now I understand how great this opportunity is for other companies to get their own portal at their disposal and not think about technical support, about who will implement new functions and how to cope with the growing workload, and about many other things. Moreover, the owners of the portal do not need to worry about development - because for us, this is one of the main sources of income, we will inevitably continue to develop and improve the portal, constantly adapting it to all new user needs.

Having specially set the cost of royalties comparable to the salary of one good specialist, we made a very good offer, especially for those who thought about creating such a project on their own.

Thus, summarizing all of the above, it makes sense to engage in development on your own or order it from someone only when you are confident that you can maintain and develop your project at the proper level. Otherwise, it is better to look for a similar cloud service or solution, especially paying attention to companies that themselves actually use their product.