Custom vs off-the-shelf software - a Founder's perspective

Aidan - our CEO & Founder (as well as the original coder of Uptick) discusses the pros and cons of building your own software for your fire protection business.

Does it ever make sense for fire protection companies to write their own software?

Custom software is great. It does exactly what you need. Uptick itself started as a piece of custom software written for a single auditing business before focusing on the fire safety market.

Off-the-shelf fire inspection software like Uptick is never going to be able to meet every requirement your business has. It may solve 80% of them 80% as well as you’d like.

Good off-the-shelf software isn’t cheap either. We're always conscious that it is a significant investment for your business of five to six figures annually (depending on your size).

So whether you're evaluating the option of building your own software versus going with an existing platform like Uptick, here are some of the key things to consider.

How much development time and money do you need?

That’s a tough question to answer - how long is a piece of string?! But it’s almost certainly more than you think.

For comparison, we've spent more than $30M AUD on product development for Uptick, and it's taken us 10 years to get to where we are. If you’d asked me how much development we were going to need when we started the business that’s a number I’d never have guessed.

That’s a lot of investment and development time to catch up on. Not everything we build is going to be used by every customer, but most use somewhere at least two-thirds of our available features.

An on-shore team of 5 is going to cost at least $1M AUD per year (one backend dev, one frontend dev, one mobile dev, one designer, one product/project manager). An off-shore team will be significantly cheaper, but will require much more management. If you’re looking at an agency, expect that team to cost $3-4M per year.

What about keeping up?

Feature development

Uptick spends around $6M AUD per year on salaries for its engineering and product team (and that number grows roughly 40% per year).

Where does all that money go? One of the things that sets Uptick apart from other field service management software vendors is that we’re exclusively focused on fire protection - all our product efforts are concentrated on features that benefit users in this industry alone.

That kind of spend is impossible for any one business to match, so even if you managed to catch up to where Uptick is now, inevitably the gap will widen in no time at all. With the rapid progression of AI, and the promise of augmented reality (AR), the landscape is going to change quickly, and then custom software really starts to be left behind.

Software updates

If you’ve built your own system, you’ll need to keep that up to date too. Software needs to be maintained - bugs will be discovered, security holes patched, and because the software world is constantly evolving you’ll need to be constantly upgrading packages and frameworks to stay up to date with iOS or language upgrades.

Unlike a building which is built once and serves its purpose for 10-20 years without requiring significant renovation, the software world moves much faster. Bugs are constantly discovered in operating systems (things that run software) and frameworks (things that software leverages to do common tasks) - keeping up with these changes requires constant attention.

Getting behind in these updates can become terminal for software, where the cost of catching up on updates suddenly exceeds the cost of rewriting the software on a modern stack.

Is custom fire protection software secure?

In addition, getting behind with software updates can create vulnerabilities that can be exploited by hackers seeking to gain access to sensitive and potentially valuable data.

This can happen to off-the-shelf software too, of course, but software companies are much more likely to:

• regularly update and patch their systems
• dedicate internal resources to maintaining and improving information security
• adhere to recognised information security and data protection standards such as ISO/IEC 27001

For example, another area we invest in at Uptick is penetration testing. We hire an independent consultancy to try and gain access to our system to identify any potential vulnerabilities we need to address.

What if off-the-shelf software doesn’t quite work for me?

If no off-the-shelf system ticks all the boxes, it can sometimes be possible to plug the gaps via an API or by integrating a separate system. APIs - Application Progamming Interfaces - allow different software packages to communicate, for example so that data can sync between them.

Numerous Uptick customers have harnessed the Uptick API to enable seamless workflows and data exchanges between their key operational systems.

Conclusion

It can sound tempting to build your own software. If you succeed, it’s likely that the custom software will meet the requirements of your business better than off-the-shelf software ever could.

It’s worth keeping in mind that most software projects fail to be delivered, and of those successfully delivered even fewer meet the desired outcomes.

Most custom builds exceed their budget by 100%. Even if you’re working with an agency on a fixed price, you are certain to discover requirements along the way that you hadn’t thought of during the planning stage.

And don’t underestimate maintenance - your business requirements will change as your business grows, which means you’ll continue to incur costs over time that are going to stack up quickly.

Finally, ask yourself: are you really as unique as you think? Uptick has 700+ companies using our software to generate $3B in revenue every year.

Everyone thinks their way is the best way and maybe it is … but your budget is only going to go so far, so you’re going to miss out on things like AI-assisted scheduling, an incredible customer portal experience, floorpans and remote panel monitoring, and much more.

I’m obviously biased, but there’s very few companies in the world running on their own custom software. We know - we’ve spoken to more than 10,000 of them.