The sticker price of an off-the-shelf platform is almost always lower than a custom system. What doesn’t show up on that invoice is the cost of every workaround a team builds to make the tool fit: the parallel spreadsheet, the manual double-entry, the step someone does "outside the system" because the system doesn’t support how they actually work.

Those workarounds are invisible in a sales demo and very visible eighteen months in, when the team is running the business half inside the tool and half around it.

A system built around the actual workflow costs more upfront and less over time — not because custom software is inherently better, but because it doesn’t generate a second, informal system alongside it.

The real cost of generic software is the shadow system your team builds to work around it.