The example I made about inventory wasn't random.

One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few fields to a csv output.

So the total cost of XXX is in the 2M/year range, and it keeps ballooning.

My (4 men) team already takes care of the entire warehouse management process except inventory, the only thing that XXX provides, we literally handle everything: picking, manufacturing, packaging, shipping phase and many others.

In any case, nobody has mentioned vibe coding.

I stated that a handful of good engineers with the aid of AI in a couple of months can provide a working prototype to evaluate. In our case it's about extending our software that already does everything, except inventory management.

When you spend 2M/year on a software (1% of your revenue), growing every year by 100/150k it makes sense to experiment building a solution in house.

Its funny you mention excel, I see vibe coding in the business sense right now being a gateway to replace all of the ad hoc uses of excel. We've basically leveled up the quality of the software you can build before buying a SaaS product or a hiring an in house engineer.