There is a company size at which off-the-shelf software starts falling short, and Badalona has a great many businesses sitting exactly in that band. Custom software in Badalona is almost never commissioned to modernise: it gets commissioned when the team has spent months plugging gaps with spreadsheets and nobody knows which version is the good one any more.
The size where standard software breaks
Badalona covers 21.18 km² with a density of nearly 10,900 people per square kilometre, according to the municipality in figures published by Idescat. But other numbers matter more here: 13,665 people registered as self-employed and 59,340 general-scheme registrations tied to accounts in the city.
The detail is in how those registrations split: 12,460 in accounts with up to nine employees and 14,675 in accounts with ten to forty-nine. That second band is exactly where off-the-shelf systems give way. With five people, everything fits in one person's head and three spreadsheets; with twenty, it does not. And with 524.8 million euros of industrial gross value added and 808.3 from retail, there are plenty of companies that size here with their own processes that no generic package accounts for.
The four moments when software falls short
They do not arrive all at once. They usually turn up in this order.
1. When you go from five people to twenty
What used to be solved by asking across the room now has to be written down. In come the email chains titled "RE: RE: order", the shared sheets with four versions, and the person who knows how everything works and can never take a holiday.
2. When you open a second site, warehouse or job
What worked in one place stops working in two. Stock stops adding up, each team records things their own way and nobody knows what is available without making a phone call.
3. When nobody else does your process
The clearest case of all. If the way you price a quote, plan routes or track production differs from the rest of your industry, no off-the-shelf package will cover it. You end up adapting the company to the software, which usually costs more than the other way round.
4. When regulation changes and your system cannot keep up
Invoicing is the classic example. If you are building something that issues invoices, it has to comply with the Spanish tax agency's regulation on invoicing software systems. It is one of the first things we check, because it shapes how that part is built.
Before building: the map of where data gets copied by hand
The first meeting is not about technology. It is about following an order, a work sheet or a delivery note from the moment it arrives until it is paid, noting every time somebody copies a piece of data from one screen to another. That map usually fits on one sheet of paper, and the whole project is in it.
Each of those manual jumps is lost time and a chance to make a mistake. The first module almost always tackles the jump that repeats most, not the one that sounds most exciting. If you want the full method for deciding, we have it in which tasks to automate.
Connect before replacing
One idea that saves money: you do not always have to throw away what you have. If the invoicing software works and the team knows it inside out, the sensible move is often to build only the missing piece and connect it to what is already there, rather than replacing a whole system people already know how to use.
Changing software carries a cost that never appears in the quote: the month the team spends getting used to it. When it can be avoided, avoid it.
What is not worth building from scratch
- Accounting. There are good, cheap packages that already comply with everything; building it from zero never pays off.
- Email, calendars or file storage. Same story.
- Processes that still change every month. Let them settle first, automate after.
- Anything one person uses once a week. The saving does not cover development or maintenance.
Saying this upfront is part of the job. A supplier who says yes to everything is an expensive supplier.
Want to know what it would cost you?
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.
The part that decides whether it works: the team
Custom software does not fail because of the technology, it fails because nobody uses it. We have seen it: it gets delivered, there is a two-hour training session on a Friday afternoon, and a fortnight later everybody is back on the old spreadsheet.
What does work is three unspectacular things. One, having someone inside the company who answers questions during the first months. Two, starting with a small group before handing it to everyone, so five people find the bugs rather than thirty. And three, not launching anything in peak season: in a business with a busy period, August or Christmas is the worst possible moment to change how people work.
How it is quoted, and why we publish no rate
Custom software is quoted per project, and not out of secrecy: the price depends on how many processes are involved, how many systems it has to talk to, how many people will use it and how much old data needs migrating. Putting a fixed figure on the website would mean making it up.
What we do is split it. First a short analysis phase, with the map and the scope in writing; then development in modules, starting with the one that saves the most hours. That way you see the first part working before committing to the rest.
What is published are the web and marketing plans: 100 € a month for the landing, 200 € for the site with up to ten subpages —both with domain, hosting, email and maintenance included— and 400, 750 and 1,500 € for the plans with articles, Google profile, campaigns and social media. Excluding VAT and with no lock-in.
Timings: what actually stretches them
A first useful module is usually running within weeks; a complete system takes months. What stretches the timeline is almost never the programming: it is the old data that has to be cleaned before migrating, the internal decisions left hanging and third-party permissions to connect with another system.
That is why we work in short deliveries: every fortnight there is something you can open and try. If something does not fit, it shows up early and gets fixed cheaply.
What to put in writing
Before signing, four points:
- Who owns the code and what happens to it if you ever change supplier.
- Where the data lives and how it is exported, because it belongs to your customers and to you. The Spanish Data Protection Agency has clear guides for small companies on this.
- What maintenance covers and what gets billed separately.
- Who holds the access to the server and the repository.
It is the same conversation you need to have about your website domain, and for the same reasons: we cover it in who owns your domain.
We work from Palamós for the Barcelona area
Our office is in Palamós and we run projects across the province. In custom development, distance matters less than people think: what matters is somebody who picks up the phone, understands your process and shows progress every fortnight. We come in person for the first meeting, to see the warehouse or workshop when the project calls for it, and for training the team.
If it feels like your software has outgrown its usefulness, message us on WhatsApp telling us what the company does and where data gets copied by hand. We will tell you whether it can be fixed by connecting what you already have or whether something needs building. No strings, same day.
Tell us what you need and we'll give you a price
We reply the same day. No commitment, no sales pitch.