Every month someone sits down with us in Vientiane and says some version of: "We need our own system." Sometimes they're right, and it changes their business. Sometimes what they need is a $9 spreadsheet template and the courage to enforce it. The trick is telling the difference before spending money, so here is the framework we use in those meetings — free of charge, sales pitch clearly labeled and kept for the end.
Level one: the humble spreadsheet
If fewer than three people touch the data, and they touch it less than daily, you almost certainly need a well-organized Google Sheet, not software. Inventory counts for a small shop, a staff schedule, a simple customer list — Sheets handles all of it, it's free, everyone already knows how to use it, and it works on the phone of every employee you'll ever hire.
The spreadsheet breaks when several people edit at once, when typos start costing money (a misplaced zero in a price column), or when you find yourself maintaining three copies of the "same" file called FINAL_v2_REAL. Those are the actual signals to move up — not ambition, not a competitor's Instagram post about their new app.
Level two: off-the-shelf SaaS
For every common business problem — accounting, payroll, project tracking, email marketing — there's a polished subscription product built by a team that has thought about that one problem for a decade. If your process is standard, SaaS is close to unbeatable: instant, cheap, someone else fixes the bugs at 3am.
The catches, in order of how often they hurt businesses here:
- Your process isn't as standard as the demo assumed. The tool handles 80% beautifully; the remaining 20% breeds workarounds, and workarounds breed unmanaged spreadsheets — you're back at level one, but now also paying a subscription.
- Regional blindness. Dollar-first pricing, no kip, no Lao language for staff, payment methods nobody here uses, support that answers while you sleep. Southeast Asia is an afterthought to most global SaaS.
- Per-seat pricing scales against you. $12 per user per month is nothing at three users and a real line item at thirty.
Level three: custom software
Custom makes sense in exactly three situations, and we'd encourage you to be suspicious of anyone who claims a fourth:
- The process IS the business. Whatever makes customers choose you over the shop next door — if software runs that thing, generic software makes you generic. This is why we built our own POS instead of adapting to someone else's idea of a restaurant.
- Gluing systems together. When staff retype data from one system into another every day, a small connector — often just a few weeks of work — routinely saves more than its cost in the first year. This is the most underrated category of custom software for SMEs.
- The off-the-shelf 20% is unbearable. You've genuinely tried the SaaS options, and the gap between how they work and how you work costs you daily. Custom stops being a luxury and becomes cheaper than the workarounds.
Buy custom software to protect what makes you different. Rent everything that makes you the same.
The real costs, both ways
Custom software costs more up front — in our pricing, real applications start around $2,500 and grow with scope — and it needs a maintenance relationship, because software is never "finished," only "currently working." Anyone who quotes custom work without mentioning maintenance is planning to disappear.
But SaaS isn't free either: subscriptions forever, per-seat growth, price rises you don't control, and the quiet operational cost of the workaround layer. Over five years, the math is far closer than the sticker prices suggest — sometimes it favors custom, sometimes it doesn't. Run the numbers over five years, not one.
The afternoon test
Write down the three processes that eat the most staff time each week. For each one, honestly ask: is this standard (rent it), is this glue between systems (small custom connector), or is this the thing that makes us us (custom, maybe)? Most businesses that do this exercise discover they need less software than they feared — and that the one piece worth building custom is not the one they originally had in mind.
And if you want a second opinion on your list, ask us. We'll tell you if the answer is a spreadsheet. It won't be the first time.