Clients usually arrive saying "we need an app". Sometimes they are right. Other times their problem is already solved by a product that costs a few hundred lei a month, and custom development would be money thrown away.
We do both: we have our own products and we write custom software. That is why we say openly when buying is the better move.
The basic rule
If your process looks like everyone else's, buy. If the process is your advantage, build.
Rental bookkeeping, sales reports across stores, checking a business partner: these look much the same at most companies. How a chain routes orders between locations, or how an importer calculates bonus points, may be exactly what sets it apart from competitors.
Five questions before you decide
- How often does the process change? If monthly, a ready product will get in the way. If it has been stable for years, a product for it probably exists.
- Which local integrations do you need? maib, 1C, tills connected to MEV, M-Sign. A foreign product almost never has them. A local one may already.
- Whose data is it? Check where it is stored and whether you can export it. Otherwise leaving the vendor turns into a negotiation.
- What does it cost over three years, not in month one? Custom development costs a lot up front, then maintenance. A subscription is small but never stops. Compare three-year totals, including the person who looks after the system.
- Who fixes it when it breaks on a Friday evening? With a product, the product team. With custom work, whoever signed the support contract.
Where we chose a product ourselves
Some problems we saw so often that we turned them into our own products. If yours is one of them, we will not suggest writing it from scratch.
- Checking companies. Datero.md holds public data on more than 285,000 Moldovan legal entities, with history, financials and scoring, plus an API. Building your own scraper of the state register makes no sense.
- Sales reports for shops and cafés. Klaro reads the tills and 1C and sends the chain's report to Telegram in the evening. Explained here: the till and 1C in one report.
- Managing rental property. KX Estate keeps properties, leases, payments and deadlines in one place, in Romanian and Russian. For a few apartments Excel is enough. As the portfolio grows, a system saves hours every month.
Where custom development was the right call
- A store with its own rules. tMarket.md has bonus points, gift certificates, delivery in a chosen time slot, and maib's requirements met point by point. A ready-made store platform would have covered part of it and turned the rest into patches.
- A chain with many locations. At Pivoteka.md, an order has to reach the right location by itself. That is the process that sets the chain apart, so it was worth building.
The middle option
Often the right answer is in between: take a ready product and write only the link to the rest of the company. Datero has an API; KX Estate and tMarket can also be used from AI assistants. Then you write only the code that matters to you, not one more complete system.
If you want to know which option fits, write to us and describe the process, not the solution. If buying is better, we will say so. We covered costs separately: what a custom website or SaaS costs in Moldova.