“SaaS or custom?” comes up in almost every assessment. It is rarely the right question. It assumes you must pick a side, while real landscapes are already assemblies: published products, legacy builds, integrations, and a few truly differentiating pieces. The useful question is narrower: where the business needs its own shape, and where it can accept a market commodity.
Three criteria without much rhetoric
Three criteria help without much rhetoric. First, is the process a competitive advantage or a cost to contain? Second, do you need ownership of code and data model, or only of business outcomes? Third, does the application landscape impose integrations, volumes, or regulatory constraints that the catalog does not cover well? Answers are not always sharp, but they guide better than a prior preference for “build” or “buy”.
When the process is differentiating and poorly served by available products, a tailored platform - sometimes built on an existing core - makes sense. When the need is standard - time tracking, uptime monitoring, pre-accounting - a published product reduces drift risk and maintenance cost. The common failure is inventing a tool where the market is already mature, or forcing a generic SaaS onto a process that carries the company’s operational identity. The AI Solution Factory approach formalizes the same trade-off.
Publish and design, without camps
We hold both postures because the field requires them: publishing products and designing business platforms. A short assessment is not there to sell one or the other; it is there to avoid the wrong trade-off. Success is not architectural sophistication. It is the ability to evolve the system in five years without rewriting everything. That is also the spirit of building for ten years.
For standard needs, the catalog may be enough: Hivity to connect the landscape, Simple Timesheet for time entry, Monitorix 360 for availability. For a differentiating need, a dedicated platform remains legitimate. On that point, the solutions page and the AI Solution Factory note help frame the trade-off without ideology.
