The honest answer is that most businesses should buy, not build. Here is the small set of questions that tells you which camp you are in.
Start by assuming you should buy
Building software is expensive to start and more expensive to keep. If an existing product covers 80% of your need, that last 20% is rarely worth six figures and a permanent maintenance commitment.
The questions that change the answer
Is this process how you compete? If your scheduling logic is the reason customers pick you, generic scheduling software will flatten exactly the thing that makes you different.
How much would you have to bend? Configuring a tool is fine. Redesigning your operation around someone else's assumptions is not.
What does the integration burden look like? Sometimes the honest comparison is not "buy vs build" but "buy plus a year of integration work vs build".
A middle path
Buy the commodity parts — accounting, email, CRM — and build only the thin layer that is genuinely yours. Most of the successful projects we work on look like this rather than a full custom rebuild.
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