Yes, they might be able to build software that works for (relatively) close to free now. But that still has marginal cost in terms of extra resource to build it. Then it needs to be maintained, upgraded to meet changing internal requirements, it needs to be secure, they need to be able to trust it does what it's supposed to.
Sure, the cost of all of that has come down, but it's still a lot of work when they could just entrust another company to do that for a cost they're willing to pay. And companies are often happy to pay a lot in B2B contracts.
Just to reinforce this: look at the cost savings from cloud-exits - yet companies still readily build out in the cloud. FOSS has existed for decades, yet companies still pay for proprietary alternatives. Build vs buy exists on more dimensions than just cost alone.
When a software suite costs a company $70-100k per year that does a bunch of stuff they don’t want, they’ll definitely pay you to build bespoke tools for $24k per year.
Literally doing this now.
Maybe I'm overthinking things. There were companies paying out the ass for relatively basic WordPress sites in the past (and probably still)
I’m on vacation right now, but my main customer is constantly adding new feature requests, etc. and until I went on vacation their work was as good as 2 or 3 customers per month, “oh can you do this? What about this?” I honestly am looking forward for them to throttle back a little because I could use another similar volume customer, but I hardly have enough time to really invest to make that happen until they get all the things they want and while they’re paying me I ain’t going to stop.
It was also pretty cool, because there’s a young engineer working there in a non-engineer role as a human forklift. I said, “hey, I need help implementing all this stuff” now he has a raise, and he is kind of like an embedded customer support person, and I don’t have to stress about it so much.
Regardless, just build.
The phone call automation for their front desk saves something like 40 hours of work a month just of people looking up customers to call about their schedule etc. And that’s just one tool and I deployed it in like 4 days. It’s really not that hard, just go out and make people’s lives easier and stop trying to scale or whatever.
It was something that looked like it was originally written in visual basic and than rewritten in react for tablet devices.
I'm still under NDA but the above figures related to per company\ per month sales are about right
Am I missing something, are you juggling like 5 or more of these types of jobs?
No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional CFO.
No-one pays $2k/mo for a fractional sales head.
No-one pays $2k/mo for environmental paperwork consulting for a manufacturer.
They can do it all in house. Why would they?
Right?
Except all of these actually do happen, of course, and each is a big industry.
As soon as this industry lost the inscrutability of the syntax of the work product, it began catastrophizing about the total end of any commercial demand at all.
Yet by this logic there should be almost no service providers at all for any industry that lacks legal certification barriers.
Good lord guys…