The honest answer is that most businesses should buy ready-made software, and a minority should build. The problem is that the minority and the majority both believe their process is unique. Here is how to tell which group you are in.
The 80% test
Write down your ten most frequent operational tasks — raising a quote, booking an order, issuing a challan, closing a month. Now demo a ready-made product against those ten. If eight or more work out of the box with only configuration, buy it. Customising the remaining two is cheap. If only five work, every gap becomes a customisation, and customised off-the-shelf software is the worst of both worlds: you pay licence fees forever and still cannot upgrade cleanly.
Where ready-made usually wins
- Standard trading, distribution and retail with conventional GST billing
- Professional services with timesheet-based billing
- Small manufacturing with simple, stable bills of material
- Any business under about 20 users where speed matters more than fit
Where custom usually wins
- Your pricing logic is genuinely unusual — slab-based, contract-based, or negotiated per customer
- You operate a process your industry does not share, and it is why customers choose you
- You have outgrown a product and are paying for 40 modules to use six
- Compliance in your sector is not covered by any Indian product
- You need the software to be an asset you own, not a subscription you rent
The hidden cost of customising a product
A heavily customised Odoo or SAP B1 instance is expensive in a way that does not appear on any invoice: you cannot take major version upgrades without re-testing every customisation. Businesses in this position typically freeze on an old version within three years, which is how you end up running unsupported software in 2031.