Custom Software for Everyone

It’s still a little early for this to be a reality, but it’s coming. The tools aren’t quite ready, and not enough people have the skills to make it happen. It won’t be long, though, before even the smallest businesses can justify hiring someone to write custom software for them.

Summary

AI-assisted development will soon make developers so efficient that custom, end-to-end software integration will become affordable for small businesses. Right now, small businesses rely on a patchwork of off-the-shelf tools, creating inefficiencies as employees manually move data between them. The high cost of developers makes true custom solutions impractical.

This is about to change. AI dramatically increases a developer’s productivity, shifting the financial calculation. What is now “spend thousands to save hundreds” will become “spend thousands to save or earn tens of thousands.” This makes hiring a developer for short-term projects a no-brainer, putting the power of enterprise-level integration within reach of everyone.

The Small Business Software Problem

Most small businesses rely on pre-packaged, off-the-shelf (OTS) software. It’s a huge improvement over paper and pencils for things like bookkeeping, inventory, and customer relationship management.

Often, the best choice is software made for their specific industry. A mechanic has very different inventory and customer needs than a retail clothing store, and good OTS software reflects that.

The problem is, OTS software is seldom perfect for any single business. Every company has its own unique way of doing things. This means most small businesses use a bunch of different tools that don’t talk to each other. Employees end up managing the flow of data, manually copying information from one system to another.

The Power of End-to-End Integration

The ideal setup for any company is a single, end-to-end solution. From the moment a customer places an order until the final payment and follow-up, everything is handled by one integrated system. It connects customer data, inventory, work orders, sales, and everything else.

This kind of integration is incredibly powerful.

• Steps in a process don’t get missed.
• Steps are done consistently and properly.
• It reduces labor costs because no one is spending their day copying and pasting data.
• It lets the business focus on what it does best.

Enterprises - the really big companies - figured this out a long time ago. They use custom off-the-shelf software (COTS), which is just OTS software that has been modified by developers to fit their specific processes. They can afford it because their problems are bigger, and the payoff is huge.

Why Custom Work Is Out of Reach

For a small business, hiring a developer just doesn’t make financial sense.

Developers are expensive, and most businesses don’t want to pay for a 40-hour week for months at a time. Trying to hire someone for a small project on a site like Upwork or Fiverr can work, but it comes with a lot of friction.

• It’s still expensive, often costing a few thousand dollars.
• The business owner has to learn a lot of technical jargon to communicate what they need.
• The more “hand-holding” an outside developer has to do, the more it costs.
• External consultants are always selling, trying to push for more work and more income.

The return on investment just isn’t there. Spending thousands of dollars to save a few hundred in labor doesn’t add up.

Solutions like “low-code” platforms have existed for a while, letting users build simple workflows with diagrams. They’re a step in the right direction, but they have their limits.

AI Changes the Equation

AI-assisted development is going to change all of this.

Right now, someone with no development experience can use AI to write small utilities. This “vibe-coding” has limits, though (see The Craftsman and the Code). Without good guidance, the AI makes small mistakes that accumulate until the whole thing breaks. Experienced developers go through a similar process when they’re learning; they “write themselves into a corner” and have to learn how to avoid it.

The real game-changer isn’t about turning everyone into a developer. It’s about how AI makes an experienced developer radically more efficient.

Hiring a professional developer for a short project suddenly becomes a viable option. The old equation was “spend thousands of dollars to save or earn a few hundred.” That doesn’t make sense.

The new equation will be “spend thousands of dollars to save or earn tens of thousands of dollars.” That’s a no-brainer.