For twenty years the advice was simple: unless you're big, buy SaaS. Building custom was too slow and too expensive to justify. That advice is now out of date for a specific, important reason — the cost of building custom collapsed while the cost of forcing your business into someone else's software did not.
SaaS wins when your process is generic. Accounting, email, payroll at a basic level — buy it, don't build it. But most Philippine SMEs have a process that is not generic: the way a signage contractor gates billing on completion, the way a solar installer proves ROI, the way a chocolate maker splits Cebu vans from Manila couriers. Off-the-shelf software either can't model that, or makes you pay per seat forever to bend it halfway.
The new decision rule: if the workflow is your competitive edge, own it. When we built Trilor's ops platform, the completion-gated billing wasn't a feature request — it was the whole point. No SaaS would enforce it. A custom build did, in seven days, and Trilor owns it outright.
So the answer isn't 'always custom' or 'always SaaS.' It's: buy the commodity, build the edge. And now that building the edge takes days instead of months, the balance has tipped toward building far more often than it used to.