If you’re tempted to build custom membership software for your large and complex organization’s unique needs – stop!
Read on for six compelling reasons not to take on the risks of build-your-own software.
When you’re running a large, complex association or labor union, it can be tempting to want to build custom membership management software. After all, your organization is unique – with multiple membership levels and specific processes that don’t always fit neatly into off-the-shelf software.
But consider that it’s likely cheaper, better, and faster to buy commercially available membership management software than to build it yourself. Here are six things to think about:
1. Vision
Choosing to build custom software is often a response to a current organizational need. It doesn’t 
always look down the road at what your organization might face in the future.
With established membership management software, you can get the benefit of decades of experience and knowledge about membership-based organizations and software best practices. You can also get optimal scalability, security, performance, and storage features to keep your organization going strong for years to come.
TIP: Aptify membership management software by Community Brands easily adapts to meet your needs today and in the future. It’s highly configurable, so you can custom-brand member-facing portals, upgrade the software, and add modules as needed without having to rebuild the core system. Plus, Aptify is built on Microsoft Azure, giving you industry-leading cloud-native security, scalability, and performance.
2. Resources
Your organization might have software developers on staff, or you might be considering hiring third-party developers. But you’ll need more than that to build, manage, and maintain your own software. You’ll need a product manager, business analyst, product release engineer, quality assurance engineer, technical writers, change management managers, and more to design, build, launch, implement, and support the software.
3. Time
Building membership management software from the ground up can take years to complete. It’s not efficient, much less realistic, to wait that long for the project to be finished when you need a solution now.
TIP: Aptify enables your entire team to work efficiently. Even non-technical staff can manage membership data and processes, create dashboards, and run reports without IT help.
4. Maintenance
Once you do finish building the software, what about maintenance and improvements? It will be completely up to your organization to keep it running and build new features to meet future needs. 
TIP: Your IT team will love Aptify’s developer-friendly platform, integration-friendly APIs, and optional professional services for adapting the solution to your organization’s needs.
5. Cost
If you consider all costs of building your own software, it really starts to add up. Costs will likely include:
- Salary for multiple developers over multiple years
- Tools, such as those for load and security testing
- Salary/compensation for people to test the software, write documentation, train your staff, and more
When you think about the full cost, it’s significantly more than your organization would likely spend on modern commercial software.
6. Issues
What happens if your developers leave the organization part-way through the project? Or if the software doesn’t end up working the way you thought it would? Or if your staff needs more training than you anticipated? You’re on the hook for finding a solution – and that will only add more time and cost to the project. Is building custom software really worth the risks?
TIP: For more than 25 years, Aptify has been a trusted provider of membership management software for large and complex associations and labor unions.
Consider all of the aspects of custom-built software, and you can’t help but ask yourself, “Why build when we can buy?” The whole point of taking on a software development project would be that you couldn’t find a product that meets your organization’s requirements. But in today’s market, there’s no need to put your organization in danger of a risk-prone project – especially when your team could be focused on your organization’s primary mission.
Your organization might have complex and unique needs that don’t fit inside the built-in capabilities of commercial software. But by choosing the right membership management software, you can customize the software to meet your specific needs for many years to come.
Learn more
Discover more about why Aptify is the ideal membership management software for large, complex associations and labor unions: Explore Aptify.
