A business owner tells me they need a custom system built. When I ask what it has to do, the answer describes something that three existing tools already do, wired together in an afternoon.
They were not being unreasonable. They scoped the project against what they knew about. The options they did not know about were, functionally, not options.
This is the quietest and most expensive constraint in any project, and it applies to me as much as anyone.
How it shows up
Three patterns, over and over.
Paying monthly for something you already own. Somebody pays a subscription for a QR code that can be re-pointed, or a booking widget, or a form service. All reasonable products. Frequently they duplicate something already included in a tool the business is paying for — or something that takes an hour to set up once and then costs nothing.
Building custom when a config change would do. The request comes in as “we need software for this.” Underneath, the actual need is a report that already exists behind a menu nobody opened, or a workflow the current system supports and nobody switched on.
Ruling out the right answer because it sounds too big. The mirror image. A business assumes a proper solution is out of reach, so they carry on with a spreadsheet and three hours of manual work a week — when the real thing would have taken a couple of days.
Vendors are not incentivised to tell you their product is unnecessary, and you cannot search for a solution when you do not know the word for it. The gap persists because both sides of the conversation have a reason not to close it.
What actually helps
Not becoming technical. You do not need to learn to code to stop overpaying for things.
Describe the outcome, not the solution. There is a large difference between “I need a custom booking system” and “customers call after hours and I lose the job if I do not ring back by morning.” The first is a purchase order. The second invites someone to tell you the cheap version.
Ask what this would look like if it were simple. A good question to ask anyone quoting you, including me. If there is a cheaper path and they have skipped past it, this surfaces it. If there genuinely is not, you will get a straight explanation of why.
Ask what you already have. Most businesses are paying for more capability than they use. Before buying anything new, it is worth ten minutes checking whether an existing tool covers it.
Spend a little time seeing what is possible. Not learning to build things — just seeing. Watching somebody solve a problem adjacent to yours expands the set of solutions you can imagine, which is the actual bottleneck. I have written about free tools that replace paid subscriptions, which is a decent place to notice how much of this exists.
Where I get this wrong too
I am not writing this from above it. I ran ads for months before I got on a call with someone who knew the platform properly, and learned in one conversation that several things I had assumed were impossible were settings I had not found.
The lesson was not that I should have read more documentation. It was that I had been scoping my own advertising against an incomplete picture and had no way of knowing which part was missing. The only fix was talking to somebody with a different map.
The practical takeaway
Before you commit real money to solving a problem, get one conversation with somebody who solves that kind of problem regularly — ideally somebody who does not profit from the answer being complicated.
Sometimes they will confirm you need the expensive thing, and now you can buy it confidently. Often they will point at something that already does most of it. Either way, an hour spent widening the set of options you know about is the cheapest part of any project.
If you have something you have been putting off because it sounds expensive, describe the outcome to me and I will tell you what I would actually do — including when the answer is that you do not need me.