Most business software is bought the way a man once bought a suit off a magazine ad. Here’s the story, what it costs companies every year, and the word we use for the alternative.
He goes shopping, passes an ad on an endcap, and there’s Dwayne Johnson looking magnificent in a charcoal two-piece. I must have that suit.
So he buys it. The exact suit, the exact cut, in the exact size that fits the shape of Dwayne Johnson, fully expecting to look just as good.
He walks out beaming. They’ll respect me now. Sleeves past his knuckles. Inseam pooling over his shoes. Enough fabric in the chest to hide a second, smaller man.
It’s a silly picture, and everyone can see the fix: you get a suit cut for your own shape. We’re all different, after all.
Oddly enough, this is what most companies do with their “big-boy” software.
The pattern repeats in company after company. It runs on a schedule you can almost set your watch by.
Multi-year, multi-million, for a system that almost fits the company’s current shape. It looked great on someone else.
Eighteen months in, it still doesn’t fit. The CTO now has to justify the whole contract, so the problem becomes the company.
Consultants and integrators arrive to fit and trim. Not the software. The business. Workflows get rewritten to match the screens.
A few years on, the company has drifted from what it loved doing to a “software-first” company, forever bulking and cutting to fit the suit.
Layoffs, ugly meetings, finger-wagging. The CFO and CEO want justification for a system that never supported the actual workflow.
Software built to fit one business exactly, owned by that business, and run wherever it chooses. The short way to say it: first-party software, with SaaS upkeep.
You probably never needed the suit. You probably needed the Jack Black version: shorts and a flannel shirt. Keep it light. Build it with love, attention and intention.
Custom development usually means a long project, a big invoice, and then silence. This means the software is built fast, kept running by someone, priced per project rather than per seat, and changed the same week your business changes. tiknix is one way to get there; a small shop like ClickSimple is another.
Partly. Build-versus-buy assumes building is slow and expensive, which was true. AI planners and builders changed the cost, so the question now is whether you own what you use. The answer here is yes, always.
No. Someone hosts it, the way SaaS is hosted. The difference is that you can take it with you. On tiknix each project runs in its own isolated environment and can be published to your GitHub or your client's domain whenever you like.
Any business whose way of working is part of its advantage. Agencies building for clients, founders replacing a stack of subscriptions, operators with a process the big platforms never quite fit. If you have ever hired consultants to change your company so a tool would work, this is for you.
Whatever building costs, once, plus someone keeping it running. On tiknix that is a free first project, then $49 a month per project, with no per-seat fees and no credits, because you bring your own model.
Matthew Frederico of ClickSimple, the company behind tiknix, ShipCannon and DealerYes. The phrase came out of watching companies spend years tailoring themselves to fit software they bought.