When the business has outgrown its tools
You can usually tell. A new hire needs a week to learn which spreadsheet holds what. Customer details live in three places and no two agree. The tool you pay for lacks the field you need, so people paste notes into a free-text box and hope someone finds them later.
An internal system is the software your own team uses to run the business: customers, jobs, stock, quotes, schedules and the reports that come out of them, built around your process.
What we build
- A custom CRM. Contacts, deals, follow-ups and history, with the fields and stages your sales actually uses, and a link to your quoting and invoicing.
- Scheduling and dispatch. Who goes where, when, with what, and the status of every job, visible on a phone.
- Inventory and purchasing. Stock by location or by lot, reorder points and supplier orders.
- Quoting and orders. From enquiry to quote to order to invoice, in one record with no re-typing.
- A client portal. A login where your customers see status, documents and invoices, with an admin panel for your staff behind it. More below.
- Reports. The weekly numbers you now build by hand, produced from the same data.
Custom vs off-the-shelf software: a fair comparison
Often an off-the-shelf tool is the right answer, and we say so. Ranges are in CAD, rounded.
| Off the shelf (SaaS) | Custom, built in slices | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost to start | Low, usually a monthly fee per user | From $1,270 a month plus tax on a Vesk plan; as a one-off project, $50,000 to $125,000 for a small-business system |
| Time to start | Same day | First delivery in week 1 after the kickoff |
| Fit with how you work | You adapt to the product | Built around your process |
| Cost over time | Grows with seats, tiers and add-ons | A fixed monthly plan you can change or cancel |
| Who owns it | The vendor: you rent access | You: code, hosting and accounts in your name |
| Right when | One product fits your process | Your process sets you apart, or the hand-offs between tools are manual |
When off the shelf is the right answer
We build software for a living and we still say this first, because it saves owners money. Custom is worth it when your process is the reason customers choose you, when you work around the tool every day, or when the subscriptions plus the staff time spent bridging them cost more than a system built for you. Stay with a ready-made tool when:
- One well-known product matches how you work and your team uses it without workarounds. If a standard CRM fits about 80 percent of how you sell, buy it and let us connect it to your other tools.
- Your needs are standard: bookkeeping, payroll, email marketing.
- You are testing an idea. Prove demand with cheap tools before you build anything.
- Nobody on your side has time to make decisions. Custom software needs an owner who engages.
Client portals: give your customers one place to log in
Your customers ask the same questions all day: where is my order, did you get my document, what do I owe? Each answer is an email, a call or a text. A client portal is a secure web area, and an app when it makes sense, where each customer logs in and sees only their own records, while your team manages the other side from one admin screen. Ready-made portal tools are enough when you have a handful of clients and mainly share files. A custom portal earns its price when you track statuses specific to your trade or connect to accounting or inventory.
Portal pieces are sized in tokens: a simple screen is 5, a status view or document area 10, invoices and payments 12 as an integration, a summary report 6. As an example, not a real client, a 12-person renovation contractor wants customers to see progress, photos and invoices. A login and project list (5), a project detail screen (5), a document and photo area (10), a QuickBooks invoice integration (12) and a summary report (6) come to 38 tokens, which fits in one Scale month at $3,980 CAD plus tax.
Wafuz, a management app for wellness businesses, has the same two-sided shape: a back office for the owner, and a simple view where customers book, pay and leave reviews.
Built in slices, not in one big bang
The kickoff maps how your business makes money and picks the first slice, usually the one that saves the most hours or prevents the most errors. Each slice is sized in tokens before it starts: a new simple screen is 5, a report or dashboard is 6, a complete feature such as quoting or scheduling is 10, and an integration with QuickBooks, payments or Shopify is 12.
- 1Kickoff
We map the process, list the tools it touches and choose the first slice. Nothing is charged until the kickoff is done.
- 2First delivery in week 1
A working slice lands in the first week after the kickoff, so your team can use it and tell us what is wrong while it is cheap to change.
- 3Add a slice, retire a tool
Each month adds the next piece. When a slice replaces a spreadsheet or a subscription, you switch that one off.
- 4Visible throughout
Every task, bug and token is in the platform, on the web and in the app, with a monthly meeting with the senior lead and a weekly update.
What a custom system costs
The monthly plans are Starter at $1,270 (8 tokens), Growth at $2,290 (20 tokens) and Scale at $3,980 CAD (40 tokens), plus GST/HST. A Growth month buys two complete features, such as a quoting flow and a scheduling view. Scale buys four, or three integrations. A first full version of a small-business system takes several Growth months, and you can stop or change direction at any point. Hosting is included. For what an agency would quote for the same scope, see what custom software costs in Canada.
Your data, your code, your name
The code, the hosting and the accounts behind your system are in your name from day one. If you stop working with us, you take everything with you. Lomesi runs all its internal processes on one platform across seven public medical units in Mexico, and later asked us to build its distribution ERP. A bug is fixed until it works, and the first month is guaranteed with a full refund.
The contract is Canadian through APRed and billing is in CAD; the senior team is in Mexico City. If your customers will use it from their phones, see custom app development.