Because that car repair company with 3 local stores previously couldn't justify building custom software to make their business more efficient and aligned with what they need. The cost was too high. Now they might be able to.
Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't realistically build it before.
I see no way that company would save more money from hiring an experienced developer compared to paying their yearly invoice on the COTS product doing the same thing today. The only way this works is with a very wage suppressing effect.
Car repair companies won’t see a meaningful improvement to their bottom line with more custom software. Will it increase the number of cars per employee per day they can repair?
I do bespoke work like this, but mostly to replace software that’s starting to cost mid 5 figure amounts per year for a SaaS setup and the support phone line has been replaced by an LLM chat bot.
Plenty of businesses need very custom software but couldn't realistically build it before.