$9,000 for a Push Notification? It Is Time to Take the Power Back

Over the last two weeks I sat down with a handful of clients. Good people, running real businesses. And in almost every meeting, somebody slid a quote across the table, lowered their voice, and asked, "Is this normal?"

One was $4,000 for an office booking tool. A calendar, some rooms, and a button that says Book. That is it. That is the whole tool.

Another was a $9,000 setup fee to send push notifications from a phone app. Not the app. Just the part where your phone goes ding. Nine thousand dollars. For a ding.

I laughed. Then I saw their faces, realised they were not joking, and quietly stopped laughing.

Here is the part the sales deck leaves out

That booking tool is not rocket science. Room booking is one of the first things a new developer builds to learn the ropes, usually right after "Hello, World" and right before their first coffee addiction. Push notifications are a free service that Apple and Google hand to every app on the planet. Free. As in zero dollars.

So where does the $9,000 go? The sales team. The office in San Francisco with the kombucha on tap. The investors who want their money back by next spring. Your ding is paying for a lot of things, and very few of them are the ding.

And the setup fee is only the cover charge. After that comes the subscription. Per user. Per month. Forever. Hire two new staff? Your bill goes up. Want a feature they do not offer? Submit a request, and it goes on "the roadmap," which is a special place where feature requests go to retire. Stop paying? Your data, your bookings, and your history pack their bags and leave with them.

You do not own that software. You rent it. And the landlord raises the rent every January, right after sending you a cheerful email about "exciting new pricing."

Software got cheap. The prices did not.

Ten years ago, custom software was a big, scary project. You needed a team, six months, and a budget with a lot of zeros. So renting a tool from a startup made sense. It was the only way a small business could get anything at all.

That is not true anymore. The tools that developers use today are faster and cheaper than they have ever been. A good developer can now build in a week what used to take a team a whole season. A booking tool for your office, built around the way you actually work, is a small project. A notification system is an afternoon of setup and maybe a sandwich. It is not a $9,000 line item.

The subscription companies know this. They are just really hoping you do not.

What "custom" really means

Custom does not mean fancy, and it does not mean expensive. It means built for you, and owned by you.

It does what you need and nothing else. No 40-item menu of features you will never click. No little padlock icon that says "Upgrade to Pro to unlock this." No Pro. No Pro Plus. No Enterprise Platinum Ultra.

It fits the way you already work. Your staff do not have to change their habits to match somebody else's software. The software matches them. Imagine that.

You own it. The code is yours. The data is yours. If you and your developer ever part ways, it stays with you. Nobody holds your bookings hostage.

It costs what it costs to run. For most small tools that is a hosting bill measured in dollars a month, not a per-seat fee measured in hundreds. If you have lots of users or heavy traffic, the cost goes up with real use, not with a pricing tier somebody invented in a meeting.

To be fair to the other side

Not every subscription is a rip-off. Your accounting software, your email, your payment processor: those are big, regulated, and worth renting. I pay for plenty of them myself, and I am not about to build my own bank.

The question is simple. Is this tool doing something hard, or is it doing something simple and charging like it is hard? A booking calendar is simple. A notification is simple. A form that emails you is simple. If a quote for something simple has a comma in it, ask for a second opinion.

Take the power back

Here is my pitch, and it is not complicated.

Before you sign the next contract, talk to a developer. It does not have to be me. It can be someone in-house, a local shop, or your nephew who builds things on weekends. Show them the quote. Watch their eyebrows. Then ask them what it would take to build it for you.

Sometimes the answer will be, "Honestly, just buy the subscription." That is fine. Good advice is good advice.

But a lot of the time, the answer will be, "I can build that for a fraction of the setup fee, and you will never see a monthly bill for it again."

Silicon Valley has had a great run selling small businesses their own calendars back to them. It is time we stopped paying for the privilege.

Got a quote that made you spit out your coffee? Send it my way. I will tell you honestly whether it is fair, and what it would take to build it yourself. No setup fee. No ding.