Custom Development
You’ve been sold custom before, and it was a template with your logo on it.
Real custom isn’t the premium tier. It’s what you buy when the workarounds cost more each year than building it once.
There’s a test for that, and it’s below. Talking you out of a custom build is a normal outcome of the first conversation.
The short answer
Custom isn’t the premium tier. It’s what you buy when configuring an existing system stops being cheaper than building one, and there’s a test for that.
Count the workarounds. If getting the behaviour you need out of a platform requires three or more plugins, integrations or manual steps chained together, you’re already paying for custom. You’re just paying for it in fragility and in somebody’s Tuesday afternoons rather than once, in a build.
Look for structure the platform doesn’t have. Content with its own fields and its own relationships, a search that has to understand what it’s searching, a permission model that isn’t “logged in or not.” These are the three that most reliably mean custom.
Ask who breaks when it breaks. A configured stack has four vendors and no owner. When it fails at 9am, the answer is four support queues. Something built has one.
The one that isn’t a reason: wanting the site to look distinctive. Distinctive design is a design problem and it’s available at every tier. Custom is about what the site has to do.
Custom builds start at $9,000 and are scoped, not tiered. Tell us the goal.
Sound familiar
You’ve been sold custom before, and it wasn’t.
Last time, custom meant a cheap theme with your logo on it, not something built for you.
Half the functionality you paid for never actually worked.
The quote said thirty grand, the invoice said seventy, and nobody warned you.
You’re wiring three tools together every month just to keep the workaround alive.
You’re not paying for custom. You’re paying to stop paying for the workaround.
What “custom” means here
The four things custom means.
- Content models. Defining the shapes your content actually has, with real fields and real relationships between them, so that “every case study in healthcare, most recent first” is a query rather than a page somebody maintains by hand.
- Information architecture. How the whole thing is organised, navigated and found, decided before anything is built rather than discovered afterwards.
- Functionality that has to be built. Calculators, portals, structured directories, integrations that have to be reliable rather than best-effort.
- Migrations with a real mapping problem. Where the hard part is deciding what moves, what merges and what dies, and making sure nothing that had value silently 404s.
The threshold
When the workarounds cost more each year than building it once.
Count licence fees, the integration platform in the middle, and the hours somebody spends every month keeping the chain intact. That number is usually larger than people expect, because most of it is salaried time nobody is invoicing for.
Below that line, configuring is genuinely the right answer and we’ll tell you so. A Professional build with good integrations solves more problems than most people expect it to.
What this looks like at scale
That isn’t a bigger website. It’s a different kind of problem: content models, a governance model deciding who can change what, URL mapping so nothing was lost, and an external medical-information API integrated so thousands of pages stopped needing to be maintained by hand.
The site launched unified. The part worth noticing is that almost none of the work was design.
What this doesn’t cover
The work we’d send elsewhere.
- Building you an application. If what you need is software with a website attached rather than a website with software in it, say so early. That’s a different engagement and sometimes a different vendor, and we’ll tell you which.
- Ongoing development. After launch, continuing work is a retainer rather than an open build.
- Rescuing an in-flight custom build from another developer. Possible, quoted separately, and honestly assessed first. Sometimes the right advice is to finish it with the people who started it.
What it costs
Custom starts at $9,000 and is scoped per project.
Because the price is set by what has to be built rather than by how many pages there are. The two lower tiers, and what separates them, are on the pricing page.
Before any of that, there’s a conversation about whether you need this at all. Talking you out of a custom build is a normal outcome of it.