Buy off-the-shelf software if a product already does your job. Use Airtable or Notion when nothing quite fits but your process is still changing. Build something of your own once the process has settled and per-seat pricing or poor fit has become the real cost. Most small businesses should stop at one of the first two.
Worth knowing who writes the guides you are reading. The "custom vs off-the-shelf" comparisons on page one are almost all published by software agencies, and they end at "it depends — get a quote". The Airtable and Notion comparisons are published by Airtable, by Notion, or by the tools that sit on top of them. Nobody puts all three options in the same table with real numbers, because everybody is selling one column of it.
We build bespoke systems and we sell a finished product, so we are selling two of the three columns below. We are not selling the middle one, and it is the right answer more often than either of the others.
The three options, with real prices
| Off-the-shelf product | Airtable / Notion | A system of your own | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Whatever the vendor charges | Airtable $20–$45 per editor per month; Notion £8.50–£16.50 per member per month | £7,000 to build, then £100/month |
| Live in | The same day | Days, if someone in-house will own it | Weeks |
| Fit | The shape the vendor chose | Whatever you can assemble | The shape your business actually is |
| Who can change it | Nobody | Whoever built it | Whoever you appoint |
| Scales by | Seats, or units, or both | Editors | Nothing — the fee is flat |
| Ceiling | The feature list | Records, automations, and how it looks | None you are likely to reach |
| Risk | Low. Cancel and leave | Medium. You own the maintenance | Real. A bad build is money gone |
Start here: does a product already exist?
Spend an afternoon looking before you spend anything else. Accounts, payroll, email, helpdesk, e-commerce, booking, CRM — these are solved, and solved well, for a few pounds per person per month. Nobody should commission a bespoke accounts package.
The honest test is not "is it perfect", it is "does it get the job done without me redesigning my business around it". If a product does eight of your ten things and the other two are genuinely minor, buy it. Fit is worth paying for, but it is not worth £7,000 of paying for when £30 a month gets you most of the way.
The middle option: what Airtable and Notion actually cost
This is the tier most guides skip, so here are the published numbers.
Airtable is free for up to 1,000 records per base, with a maximum of five editors per workspace and unlimited read-only collaborators. Team is $20 per seat per month on annual billing ($24 monthly) and lifts you to 50,000 records per base. Business is $45 per seat per month annually ($54 monthly) and 125,000 records per base. It bills in US dollars wherever you are in the world, and your bank does the conversion.
Airtable is unusually fair on one point worth knowing: read-only collaborators, form submissions and share links cost nothing on Team and Business. You pay for people who edit. If ten people need to look and three need to change things, you are paying for three.
Notion prices in pounds for UK customers: Plus at £8.50 and Business at £16.50 per member per month on yearly billing, with monthly billing higher and AI agent credits charged separately on top. Notion works the other way round from Airtable on viewers — you pay per member, and only outside guests are free. That difference is worth checking on anything you price up, because on most tools the people who only ever look are what quietly runs up the bill.
At these prices, for a small team that needs shared records, forms and a few automations, the middle option is very hard to beat. If you are coming off a spreadsheet and you are not yet sure what the process should be, this is where to go — our guide on moving from a spreadsheet to a system makes the same case for trying one before you commission anything.
The four signals you have outgrown it
1. You are paying per editor for people who barely edit. Six editors on Airtable Business is $270 a month. That is the number to compare against a flat fee, and it only goes up as the team grows.
2. The record limits start designing your data. When you split one thing across two bases to stay under a cap, or archive live records to make room, the tool is now making decisions your business should be making.
3. Somebody outside your team needs to see it. A client, a lender, a board. It looks like Airtable, because it is Airtable, and giving an outsider a usable view of exactly one slice usually means adding a portal tool on top — another subscription, and another thing to maintain.
4. Only one person can safely change it. The automations live in someone's head, there is no test that says they still work, and nobody wants to touch the base while that person is on leave. This is the spreadsheet problem again, wearing a nicer interface.
One of those on its own is not a reason to move. Two or more, and it is worth pricing the alternative.
The arithmetic, done honestly
Take a firm with six people editing, over three years.
Airtable Business: six editors at $45 a month is $270 a month, or $9,720 over three years. A system of your own from us: £7,000 to build plus £100 a month is £10,600 over three years.
Convert those properly and Airtable wins at that size, and not narrowly. $9,720 is somewhere between roughly £6,700 and £8,100 depending on the rate, so the build costs about £2,500 to £3,900 more over the same three years. There is no exchange rate at which six editors makes a build the cheaper option.
That is the honest finding, and it is not the one we would write if we were only trying to sell builds: at six editors, a build has to justify itself on fit, not on money. If the tool does the job, the arithmetic says stay.
The crossover, if you want it: three years of Airtable Business costs more than three years of a system of your own somewhere between eight and ten editors — or between eighteen and twenty-two on the Team plan. It is a range rather than a single number because Airtable bills in dollars, so the answer moves with the exchange rate. Which is worth noticing on its own: if your core admin system is priced in dollars, your admin budget has currency risk sitting inside it.
The other direction of travel is the subscription price itself. Vertice's SaaS Inflation Index recorded software price rises of 16.4% in June 2026 — its highest monthly reading on record, and almost four times US consumer inflation of 4.2%. Whatever you pay per seat this year is not what you will pay next year.
What a system of your own costs
Ours is £7,000 to build and £100 a month to run, scoped and agreed in writing before anything is paid: your records, your rules, your roles, the things that happen without anyone remembering, your branding, your own domain, as many users as you like, and your existing spreadsheets loaded for you. The detail is on the Proprietary Database page, and the full pricing picture is in our cost guide.
For comparison, UK agencies that publish figures for bespoke work quote £10,000–£30,000 for a simple internal tool and £30,000–£80,000 for a mid-complexity application, with annual maintenance typically 15–25% of the build cost. On a £15,000 build that is £2,250–£3,750 a year in upkeep alone.
And if a product for your sector already exists
Then buy it, including from us. TenureBook is the finished product for commercial property — every occupier, lease, key date and figure in one place, from £295 a month, live the day you sign up. It exists because we built exactly that for a UK property firm first and then turned the lessons into something the next firm can just buy. A ready-made product built for your exact job beats both a generic tool and a bespoke build, every time one exists.
How to decide, in about ten minutes
- Search for a product that does your job. If one exists and it fits, buy it and stop.
- Count the people who need to edit, not the people who need to look. Multiply by $45. If that comes to comfortably under $200 a month, Airtable or Notion is your answer.
- Ask what happens if the person who built it leaves next month.
- Ask whether a client, a lender or a board will ever need to look at it, and what they would see.
Two of those four end with "do not commission anything", which is the point. If you want a second opinion from a studio that will happily tell you to stay on a $20-a-month tool, book a short call or tell us what your business tracks.