The quiet opportunity for SMEs
Small and mid-sized businesses have been priced out of custom software for twenty years. The maths has quietly changed.
For as long as custom software has existed, small and mid-sized businesses have been locked out of it. The maths was brutal. A decent bespoke tool cost a hundred grand at the low end, and the companies that could afford it were usually the ones already too big to feel the pain the tool was meant to solve.
So SMEs did the sensible thing and used whatever was in the box. Off-the-shelf SaaS. Spreadsheets, lots of spreadsheets. A CRM bent into a project tracker. An accounting tool bent into an operations dashboard. The cost wasn't in the licence fee — it was in the hours lost to workarounds, the data trapped in one-off exports, the processes that only made sense if you'd been there three years.
The economics have quietly flipped. The things that used to cost a hundred grand — the projects where the value was obvious but the price was prohibitive — now cost a fraction of that. Not because developers got cheaper, but because the same developers ship much more in the same time. A small team, a clear problem, and a month can produce software that would have been a serious capital project a few years ago.
This matters most for SMEs because the kind of software that genuinely changes how a smaller business operates is specific. It fits the way *you* work, not the way some product manager imagined a generic version of your industry. The off-the-shelf tools couldn't give you that, and now they don't have to.
The mindset shift is the harder part. SMEs have been trained to treat software as a capex project: a big one-off spend, approved by a committee, delivered in a year, frozen after launch. The better model is closer to how you'd think about a piece of equipment. You buy it to do a job. You use it every day. You maintain it. When the job changes, you change it. Ongoing leverage, not a single expensive bet.
The practical question is where to start. Good candidates share a profile: the process is specific to your business, it involves several people, it currently lives in a spreadsheet or a chain of emails, and someone on the team can describe exactly what "good" looks like. Bad candidates are vague ("we need a platform"), generic (something off-the-shelf already does better), or built on a process nobody actually understands.
If you're running an SME and you've been told for years that custom software isn't for you, it's worth a second look. The door that was closed for twenty years has quietly come open.