Open my books and count. Of the nearly one thousand paid jobs Allen App Tools has on record, more than eight hundred cost under a thousand dollars. The average job on that little shelf runs about three hundred.
That surprises almost everyone, because custom software gets pictured in one size: big. A six-month build, a five-figure invoice, a thing you’d need a committee for. I wrote a while back that custom software never had a shelf you could walk past, the way TVs do, so your sense of the price never gets corrected. Today I want to fix that properly. Here’s the shelf.
The build shelf. Everything on it is the kind of thing we actually build, sized the way it actually sells.
The small stuff
The top shelf is where most of my orders live, and most people don’t know it exists. One job, one gap, done in days. Real examples from the books: a little robot that files email attachments into the right folders with the right names and flags duplicates. A nightly checker that makes sure every form submission actually landed in the spreadsheet. A live reports page added to an app that already existed. A set of custom filters bolted onto a CRM so the team stops scrolling. An automation that charges the card on file and logs the payment.
None of that is glamorous. All of it removes a chore that was eating somebody’s hour, every day, forever. This shelf runs in the hundreds of dollars, and it’s where a lot of my clients started: not with a leap, with an errand.
One job, run properly
The middle shelf takes one whole part of the business and makes it run right. A quote builder that formats and prices the way the company actually quotes. A scheduling system for a small manufacturer. A freight-cost calculator wired into the pricing page. A field app where the crew photographs receipts and the office watches costs land on the correct job by themselves.
This is the shelf for the sentence I hear most: “we’re fine except for this one thing.” The one thing is usually quoting, intake, scheduling, or a report somebody rebuilds by hand every Monday. Fixing the one thing properly runs a few thousand dollars, and it tends to pay for itself embarrassingly fast, because it was the spot where the afternoons were going.
The whole operation
The bottom shelf is the one you’ve read about here before: the app the whole team logs into, jobs and quotes and scheduling and the numbers in one place. A fence and deck company runs on one. My own company runs on one, and I published the books on it. Over time, this shelf lands in the tens of thousands, which is about one year of what a small team already pays in subscription rent, and I did that math here.
But here is the honest mechanics of it, and it might be the most useful thing in this post: in my entire books, exactly one project was ever paid for with a single five-figure payment. Every other big system got there a phase at a time. A phase gets scoped, priced, and approved before it’s built, it ends in something that works on its own, and the next phase only happens when you want it to. The bottom shelf is really the middle shelf, visited more than once.
How to shop the shelf
Start where it hurts the most, on whatever shelf that pain lives. If you’re not sure where that is, add up the system you already run first; the sore spot tends to introduce itself. A three-hundred-dollar errand is a perfectly good first order, and plenty of businesses never need more than the top two shelves. Nothing about this is all-or-nothing, and nothing about it is a subscription: you own each piece outright the day it ships, and after launch we stay on call by the hour, the way you’d keep a good electrician’s number.
And if nothing hurts, don’t buy anything. Browsing is free. But if you’ve been carrying a “we’re fine except for this one thing” of your own, tell me the thing, and I’ll tell you which shelf it lives on and what that shelf usually runs. You might be surprised how high up it sits.