The Best Custom Software Development Companies of 2022

Benefits of Using A Custom Software Development Company

If you’ve spent years building and growing your company, the idea of turning to an outsider to create the software that you need may feel like an unnecessary and wasteful expense, especially if you already have an inhouse IT team. There are certainly advantages to using your inhouse staff — they are a known and proven quantity, already onboard, immediately accessible to discuss ongoing projects at any time; they accounted for within your budget; they already know your company’s culture, the technology that is being used, and your business’ needs and goals. Additionally, sticking with your own, existing staff eliminates questions of product ownership and trade secrets.

But even with all of those advantages, there are disadvantages that need to be taken into account. The most obvious of these is the fact that your in-house staff already has its own responsibilities. Developing custom software is time consuming and expensive. It would take them away from the critical work that they had previously been assigned to, and in many cases the personnel that you have onstaff may not have the specialized knowledge base needed to deliver state-of-the-art technology. If they have been with you for a while, they may not be familiar with the tools, languages, and platforms that you need to take your business into the future. That leaves you with the expense of having to determine exactly what skills you need to meet your goals, and then to recruit additional staff members that have those capabilities. The cost of recruitment, onboarding, overhead, hiring and benefits will quickly grow, and become a constant.

By choosing to outsource your software development project, you have the ability to choose a company based on your specific needs. You can interview various firms that will have the tools and the resources available to complete your project within a specific timeline and budget. These companies’ teams will need to be familiarized with your organization, but will already have a mature project management process in place to facilitate the discovery process, ensuring that they understand the needs of each stakeholder. Their work can quickly be scaled up or down because they already have the staff and technology on hand, and can do so without any additional costs for training or overhead.

Perhaps most important of all, once you make the decision to outsource your custom software development, you have access to experts from all around the globe from which to choose. You can seek referrals from colleagues or staff members within your IT department, or research companies based on their costs, their expertise in your industry or technology needs.

The Cost of Custom Software Development

Deciding that you need custom software development is easy. Paying for it is an entirely different thing. The cost of custom software development can vary enormously, with some projects costing as little as $10,000 and others running over $1 million. What determines the cost is the project’s requirements — how complex is what you need your software to do, and how long is it going to take the development company to get it done.

Though some of the cost will be determined by the company that you choose — opting for an offshore company based in India or Estonia is likely to cost you significantly less than paying for the same service from a U.S.-based company — there are other figures that must be taken into account. These are:

• Your software’s size and user base. This refers to the number of people who will be accessing the software and the number of modules, screens and pages of code it contains. The more extensive the software is, the longer it is going to take to create and the more it is going to cost. The reason that the number of users makes a difference is that a larger number automatically means that it will need to be optimized and tested to a greater degree.
• Your software’s complexity. The more challenging your software is to develop, the more expensive it is going to be. Challenges arise from the features that you need, the complexity of the technology that you are using, and how intricate the design needs to be. If you are looking for a product that can use traditional software languages and deployment platforms, your project will be more simple than if it needs to be written to accommodate multiple devices that each have their own operating system.
• Integration with existing or external systems. The more extensively your software needs to communicate and integrate with third-party systems, the more work it will require to create it and the more it will cost.
• Complexity of design. This is often where costs get driven up unexpectedly. Companies envision their products looking a certain way: If they are paying for new software they want it to have beautiful graphics and animations. Each of these design elements represents an additional investment in time and technology.
• User experience. Finally the way that the user experiences the software, and the ease with which they interact with it, can drive up costs. A complex program still needs to be usable, and though the complexity of software that only needs to be used by staff can be addressed with training, the same is not true for customers, for whom it is important that software be intuitive. Accomplishing this represents time and effort, and ends up adding to costs.

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