I spent three years of my professional life building workarounds inside software that was almost right.

Almost right meant I had a CRM that handled contacts perfectly but could not track the specific kind of relationship history we needed. So I built a spreadsheet that lived alongside it, with a naming convention that only made sense to me, and a monthly process of copying data between the two that took about two hours every time.

Almost right meant a project management tool that did tasks and deadlines well but had no concept of the deliverable format we used. So the team kept a separate document tracking system. Then we had two places to check for the status of anything.

Almost right meant an analytics platform that could produce any chart you wanted, but always needed a manual export from our data warehouse to feed it. Every Monday morning, someone was downloading CSVs.

I am telling you this because almost every business owner I talk to recognises this immediately. They have their own version of the spreadsheet alongside the CRM. Their own workaround that sits next to the tool that was supposed to fix the problem.

The 70% problem

Here is what I have come to call the 70% problem.

Most off-the-shelf software is built for the median business in its category. It is designed by smart people who have done genuine research into what businesses need. But it is designed for a composite of your industry, not for you specifically.

So it gets to 70% of what you need. The core workflows, the common use cases, the standard reports. All covered. Then you hit the 30% that is specific to how your business actually operates. The way your team structures projects. The information your clients need to see that no vendor ever thought to include. The integration between two systems that was never anticipated.

That 30% is where your productivity lives or dies. And off-the-shelf software cannot give it to you, no matter how many add-ons you buy.

The workaround tax

I want to put a name to something that most businesses absorb as an invisible cost.

Every workaround your team runs takes time. The spreadsheet alongside the CRM. The manual export before the report. The copy-paste between the system of record and the thing you actually show clients. The process doc that walks a new person through “how we actually use this tool.”

None of this shows up on your P&L. But if you added up the hours your team spends doing things that exist only because your software does not quite fit, the number would likely surprise you.

I ran this exercise with a consulting firm we worked with recently. They identified four distinct workarounds their team ran every week. Two of them were daily habits that nobody even questioned anymore. When we timed them out, those four workarounds were consuming about six hours of staff time per week, spread across the team.

Six hours per week is about 300 hours per year. At a fully-loaded staff cost of $50 per hour, that is $15,000 a year in workaround tax. Just for one firm, with four workarounds.

Most firms have more than four.

”Customisable” does not mean fits you

Every SaaS vendor will tell you their platform is customisable. And technically, they are right. You can change field names. You can build custom views. You can use their API to connect things.

But customisable has hard walls. You can rearrange the furniture but you cannot knock down the walls. The core data model is fixed. The workflow logic is what it is. The integrations work the way the vendor built them.

I have watched business owners spend weeks trying to force a tool to do something it was never designed to do, using workarounds built on top of workarounds. The tool technically does the thing. But it does it in a way that is fragile, confusing, and adds cognitive overhead every time someone uses it.

That is not a solution. That is just a more expensive problem.

The old objection

For years, the answer to “this tool does not fit” was: “build something custom.”

And the objection was always the same: too expensive, too slow, and you need a technical team to maintain it.

That objection was completely valid. Custom software through a traditional development agency meant a three-to-six month project, a budget in the tens of thousands, and an ongoing dependency on developers for every change.

Most businesses could not justify it. So they lived with the 70% and paid the workaround tax.

I understand why. I used to make the same calculation. The math simply did not work in favour of custom.

The economics changed

What changed is AI-assisted development.

I wrote about this in detail in our five-day custom app post, but the short version is this: AI tools have compressed the development timeline dramatically. Code that used to take weeks to write now takes hours. A working prototype that would have taken two developers a month can now exist by end of week one.

This matters because the economics of custom software were always a time problem. Developer time is expensive. Long projects burn money. Maintenance adds up. When you cut the development timeline by 80 to 90 percent, the cost picture changes completely.

We built a full job management portal for a commercial cleaning business in five days. Not a prototype. A production app with real integrations, user roles, mobile support, and live data. Five days.

That same portal from a traditional agency would have been quoted at $40,000 to $80,000 with a three-to-six month timeline. The economics that made custom software inaccessible for most businesses are gone.

What a custom internal tool actually looks like

I want to make this concrete because I think a lot of people still have a mental model of custom software as a massive, multi-year project.

Here are the kinds of tools we build through Omni Apps:

Job management portals — a single view where jobs come in, get assigned, get tracked, and generate invoices automatically. Built around the specific workflow of that business, not a generic interpretation of it.

Client portals — a place where clients can see exactly what they need to see. Progress on their project, documents, invoices, communications. No login to a generic SaaS portal that shows them 40 menu items they will never use.

Internal dashboards — pulling data from two or three existing systems and presenting it in one view, built exactly the way the person who reads it wants to see it. No more Monday morning CSV exports.

Approval workflows — a simple interface that routes the right requests to the right people, tracks the decision, and logs everything. Not a project management tool twisted into doing something it was not designed for.

CRM extensions — not a replacement CRM, but a layer that adds the specific tracking or workflow capability the off-the-shelf CRM does not have.

These are not complex enterprise systems. They are targeted tools that do one thing exactly right, instead of a hundred things approximately right.

The integration advantage

Here is what nobody tells you about custom software: it is not just about features.

It is about how the tool fits into how your team actually works.

Off-the-shelf tools have their own opinions. They have a workflow they want you to follow. You are supposed to use it this way, navigate to this menu, fill in this field. The tool was designed by someone who thought carefully about best practice. But best practice for your industry is not best practice for your specific business.

A custom tool is designed around the way your team works. The fields that matter to you are front and centre. The workflow follows your logic, not someone else’s. The integration with your other systems is built specifically, not hacked through a third-party connector.

The difference in day-to-day experience is significant. People actually use a tool that fits. They route around a tool that does not.

You probably already know what to build

Here is the thing. Most business owners I talk to can name it immediately.

“I wish there was a tool that just…” and then they describe exactly what they need. It has been rattling around in their head for months or years. They gave up on it because they assumed it would be too expensive or take too long.

That assumption needs updating.

If you have a workflow that does not fit any existing tool, or you are spending meaningful time on workarounds every week, or you have a “the one spreadsheet” that would break everything if the person who maintains it left, those are the signals.

The off-the-shelf world is not going to solve this. Another software subscription is not going to fix the 30%. But a purpose-built tool, built in days not months, probably can.

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If you have been putting off the custom tool conversation because of cost or timeline, the numbers have changed. Talk to us about Omni Apps and let’s look at what it would actually take to build what your business needs.

Or read about what AI-assisted development actually looks like in practice before you decide.