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

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

When does it make sense for fire protection companies to write their own software?

In summary: writing your own software can work out in the short term (if all goes to plan), but it's difficult to make the numbers stack long term.

Custom software can be great: it does exactly what you need (or know you need at the time you commission it). In fact, Uptick started as a piece of custom software written for an Australian auditing business before pivoting to 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: every business has its quirks and we can't do it all.

Off-the-shelf software can seem expensive too, especially when compared to consumer software (e.g. iPhone apps) or mass market software like MYOB, Xero or Quickbooks.

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, but what I can say for certain is that it's more than you think. There'll be issues with the scope (things you didn't think about at the start), and there'll be issues with the delivery (writing software is hard and you can either control costs or timeframe but not both).

Before we think about the time required to build your custom software, let's talk numbers on cost:

An on-shore team of 5 is going to cost at least $1M AUD per year (one backend developer, one frontend developer, one mobile developer, one designer, one product/project manager). If you're using an agency or development shop, expect to double or triple this number. An off-shore team will be cheaper, but it will take longer, and require more management and quality assurance resources, so let's call it half this number.

How long will I need a software development team for?

Well, we've been building Uptick for 10 years and our to do list is only getting bigger. You probably don't need everything we've built, but you'll want a mobile app (iOS, Android or both), job management (create and schedule jobs), a maintenance planner (a programme maintenance calendar), an asset register, forms and reports, a customer portal, and a connection to your accounting system.

A really motivated team might be able to tackle this in 18-24 months. At this point you're either starting to get sweaty palms or you've got a really big cheque book. But this isn't where it ends.

What about keeping up?

Uptick spends $6M+ AUD per year on salaries for its engineering and product team (and that number grows roughly 40% per year). We're uniquely positioned vs our competitors too in that we're only focussed on the Fire Protection industry, so we're only building things that you and your business need.

Where does all that money go?

• Improving existing features (streamlining workflows, automating manual processes, adding in guardrails)
• Adding new features (management reporting and dashboards, our new AI scheduler)
• Security and patch management
• Infrastructure management (zero downtime requires careful planning, execution and monitoring)

Software updates

Would you need to spend this much? Definitely not, but you should budget 20-50% of the initial build cost each year just to stay current.

The costs of not staying current only become apparent a few years down the line when something goes wrong: an underlying library is no longer supported, requiring code to be rewritten to support but, updating that library requires other libraries to be updated, which in turn need more code to be rewritten. If this goes on for too long it can become fatal, where the cost of updating can exceed the cost of rebuilding.

Security

Millions of bugs are discovered in operating systems and packages every year. Some of these bugs can lead to security vulnerabilities which can lead to you exposing your customers' confidential data. Staying on top of these updates requires active monitoring and constant maintenance.

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 Programming Interfaces - allow different software packages to communicate, for example syncing data between them.

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

You might also consider changing your processes to suit your software. What's special and unique about your business? We see a lot of "but this is how we've always done it" and sometimes that's hard to let go of, but it's only worth hanging on to if it's delivering real value to your business or customers.

Summary

Deciding whether to build your own software depends on your business' size, ambition, requirements, and ability to manage a complex software build and maintain that product for a decade.

From a cost perspective, it rarely makes sense for small and medium businesses. For large enterprises, building your own can be cheaper, but you'll be constantly lagging behind your more nimble competitors (who are effectively outspending you 10 to 1 by leveraging an off-the-shelf system).

For a large enterprise, do you need the distraction of building your own software? Will that distraction provide a long term advantage to your business, or become a burden? Are you able to attract and retain top tech talent?

Every business is different. Uptick works with 750+ fire protection companies across six countries and three continents, from sole traders to huge enterprises with 500+ employees. We love what we do and we think we've built the best software on the planet. If you want us to stress about software while you stress about running a great fire protection business, please get in touch.