We have a completely bespoke online booking system. When we started building it five years ago it was probably the right thing to do as we couldn't find anything off-the-shelf that would handle booking speed dating tickets.
However when we moved from speed dating to tour operating we were forced to add new features to our system. It all works but not as well as it should. For example our content management system is a bit of a nightmare to use. Posting a new event is time consuming and it's easy to make a mistake or leave a field unfilled.
Since then the off-the-shelf product landscape has changed immensely. I recently attended an internet dating conference and saw a product demoed by a company called Pringo Networks. It basically allows you to buy a Social Network off the shelf. In fact Pringo Networks even built a clone of Facebook in 6 hours, called Lacebook to demonstrate the products capability. Now I reckon that using conventional methods it would take you at least a year and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to clone Facebook.
Looking back over the last five years we definitely made several mistakes on when to DIY. For example we decided to build our own chat client for our online dating site. It took us months, cost us quite a lot of money and in the end didn't work as well as the widely used (in the dating industry) chat client from Userplane.
From now on I'm definitely aiming to beg, borrow or license off-the-shelf products as much as possible.
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