What Are the Disadvantages to Building a Custom App for My Construction Company?

March 28, 2023

Here at Lithium, we spend a lot of time talking about the advantages to building a custom app for construction operations: having a custom app built to meet the specific needs of your company can reduce data entry, streamline your operations and give you an at-a-glance look into how you are doing on any given project or overall.

We don’t always talk about what some of the potential downsides of a custom app would be. Not everyone needs a custom app built (hard to believe, I know!), and building a custom app for your construction company can have several disadvantages over using off-the-shelf software. We’re going to dig into some of the disadvantages below so you can make the best decision for your business.

1. Custom Apps are Expensive

Cost is probably the most obvious disadvantage of building a custom app. There will be a significant upfront cost to build the app, and then there will be ongoing maintenance costs to keep it running. Depending on your needs though, the cost conversation might not be as straightforward as it seems.

If you are a smaller company looking for a simple timekeeping and scheduling solution, you can use Google Calendar (free), and something like QuickBooks Time (often included with your QuickBooks Payroll subscription) for the low price of $0/month. You might have some duplicate data entry, and your capabilities will be limited, but it’s hard to beat free!

There are also some great tools like Console, which at $50-$250/month will be considerably cheaper than building a custom app – as long as your company can work within the parameters of whatever solution you are looking at. If you have the bandwidth (or you have someone on staff with the bandwidth), it could be worth checking out what’s available off-the-shelf to see if there is anything that could solve your problems before you commit to a custom build!

Some off-the-shelf solutions have significant per user license fees, however, and if you are using several different solutions in your company for different aspects of your operations, you could be paying thousands or tens of thousands annually in software licensing. Consolidating these off-the-shelf solutions to a single custom app could potentially save you enough money in licensing fees to offset some (or even all) of the costs associated with building the custom app!

2. Custom Apps Take a While to Build

Building a custom app takes time: we have to sit down with you and figure out what you are looking for. Then we have to do our design work and sit down with you again to make sure you are liking the direction we are going with your app. That’s all before we even start cranking out the code. While we like to move fast here, and can turn around a custom typical app in 6 weeks, you could theoretically decide on an off-the-shelf solution in one day and start using it the next (of course you might have a little more set up involved for more sophisticated systems!).

There is another part of the time conversation to consider however. You could spend a week or two researching and demoing off-the-shelf solutions to figure out which one will work best for your business. Then you spend another week or so getting it set up to work with your company and roll it out. As long as you don’t discover the off-the-shelf solution is missing a key feature halfway through the process you’ve used 2-4 weeks of your time (or another key employee’s time) getting up and running with the new system. If you have to go through this process multiple times to cover different aspects of your operations, you will spend a considerable amount of your own time that may be better spent actually making money. A custom solution might take longer to build, but it won’t be your time or your team’s time. You will still have to do some setup once it is built and roll it out with your team, but this should go quicker than with an off-the-shelf solution since the app has been built for your business to begin with.

3. Custom Apps Require Ongoing Maintenance

A custom app will need to be hosted online so you can access it from anywhere with any device. It will also need to be kept up to date. Because of this, we’ll typically provide ongoing service and support for the apps we build at $110/month. If you don’t want to opt for this, or if you have a freelancer build your app for you, you’ll need a plan for keeping your app online!

4. Custom Apps Can Do Anything

One of the biggest advantages to building a custom app is the fact that it can do anything. This can be a disadvantage too, however, if you try to build a custom app that does everything. If you are not careful, you could end up with a behemoth of an app with tons of features and functionality that you’ve paid to have developed and that you don’t even use! We’ll often encourage our customers to start with the key functionality they need for their business, and then to add additional features incrementally once they’ve fully utilized the features we’ve already built.

5. A Custom App Won’t Solve All Your Problems

This disadvantage applies as much to off-the-shelf solutions as to custom built solutions, and it seems pretty obvious, but if you read the marketing on our website (or the marketing around any off-the-shelf software), you might be forgiven for thinking we were going to solve all your problems.

There is a phrase in software, “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, and it basically means what you put into our apps is exactly what you will get out. If you have a hard time getting your foremen to give you any valuable information on their paper daily reports, chances are you will have a hard time getting them to plug any valuable information into the daily reports on your custom app. While we do our best to build apps that make everyone’s lives easier, if you and your team are not able to buy into using the app, you won’t get the benefits from it.

6. The Pain of Change

Any time you make a change in how your company operates, you and your team will need to stop doing things the way you were doing them before, and learn a new system. This applies as much to switching over to using a custom app as it does to other changes you might make in your business. This is called the “Pain of Change”, and the bigger your company is, chances are the bigger the “Pain” will be.

You’ll need to determine if the Pain of Staying the Same is better or worse than the Pain of Change: do the advantages to switching to a custom app outweigh the pain points of making that switch?

Building a custom app for your construction business is a significant investment. There are a ton of advantages to going this route, but there are definitely some disadvantages you’ll want to consider before moving forward with a custom app. If you’re interested in learning more about what a custom app might look like for your construction company, or if you’d like to discuss any of the potential disadvantages to building a custom app further, don’t hesitate to reach out!