Custom software or off-the-shelf SaaS: which to choose for a small business
For a small or mid-sized business, off-the-shelf software is the default choice, and custom development only earns its place past a volume that can be computed. The computation starts from a public number: in Québec, the median hourly wage for a software developer is $45.67, according to Job Bank, drawing on the 2023-2024 Labour Force Survey, updated November 19, 2025. One hundred hours of development therefore represent roughly $4,567 in wages alone, before payroll costs, hosting, fixes and rework. A ready-made product that covers 80 % of the need wins for as long as the remaining 20 % costs less to work around than to have written.
The tipping point is calculated rather than guessed: minutes saved per document, multiplied by annual volume, multiplied by the real hourly cost of the person doing the work. Compare that figure against the acquisition cost amortized over three to five years, maintenance included. A firm producing a dozen proposals a year will never reach the threshold, however elegant the imagined system — the hours spent writing the functional specification already exceed the hours the system would save. Volume comes first because it is the only criterion that makes the others worth examining.
The cost of a generic tool is not its subscription, it is the workaround repeated at every use. Fifteen minutes of manual rework per document — retyping an amount, fixing a layout, rebuilding a table in a word processor — comes to 50 hours a year across 200 documents, close to a week and a half of work. That number is obtained by watching the real process for two weeks, not by reading a feature grid. What deserves to be standardized and what should stay manual is sorted out in the article on automating business documents.
In Québec, the language of a client-facing document is a matter of law, not preference. Section 57 of the Charter of the French Language states that invoices, receipts, releases and other documents of the same nature are to be drawn up in French, and bars sending such a document in another language when the French version is not available to the recipient on terms at least as favourable; it has been in force since June 1, 2022. Section 55, in force since June 1, 2023, adds that parties to a contract of adhesion may be bound by its version in a language other than French only after the French version has been remitted and both have expressly agreed.
Data location cuts across both options instead of settling the choice between them. Section 17 of the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector requires a business, before communicating any personal information outside Québec, to conduct a privacy impact assessment covering the sensitivity of the information, the purpose of its use, the protection measures that would apply and the legal framework of the receiving jurisdiction, followed by a written agreement. The Commission d'accès à l'information places the entry into force of that obligation at September 22, 2023. Custom software deployed on foreign infrastructure sits in exactly the same position as a subscription.
Exit cost is the criterion most often left out, and the only one that gets paid twice. The portability right in the third paragraph of section 27 of that same Act, in force since September 22, 2024, covers computerized personal information collected from the person concerned and released in a structured, commonly used technological format: it reaches neither the documents produced, nor the templates, nor the history of past engagements. Exporting the business corpus produced inside the tool therefore falls outside that right, in whatever the contract provides. Custom software carries its own exit cost: the code stops evolving the day the person who wrote it becomes unavailable.
Custom development is justified when the process is a competitive advantage, not merely when it is unusual. A pricing method of one's own, a regulatory calculation nobody else performs, a production chain that is the business itself: those cases call for code written for them. An unusual document numbering scheme, or one more section in a template, does not — those are configuration requests dressed up as development requests. Between the two lies a middle path that gets little attention: starting from a generic product and forking it, which presupposes access to the source code. The same trade-offs surface when adding artificial intelligence, as set out in the article on generative AI for SMBs.
Every question worth asking a vendor has an answer that can be checked in the product itself. OffrePro, for instance, stores language per document rather than per account: a proposal, an invoice and a letter each carry their own language attribute, and assisted drafting of a proposal runs in that proposal's language, so the same document can be issued in French or in English without rebuilding the template. The platform, on the other hand, offers only two roles, owner and collaborator, a user belongs to a single account, and its /api/v1 space is limited to the service catalogue and a prospect intake endpoint. An organization that needs fine-grained permissions, or several companies under one login, will find in those three limits a reason to look elsewhere. This article describes legislative provisions; it is not legal advice.