The Twenty Pound Tool

Twenty pounds a month.

It's on the pricing page, it's in the advert, and it's entirely true. It's also the smallest of the four numbers you're going to pay, and the only one anybody quotes.

This issue is the sum nobody does before buying. It takes about five minutes.

Cost one: getting it to actually do the job

There's a gap between signed up and doing something useful, and in small business software that gap is where most of the money goes.

It needs to know your prices. Your areas. Your process. The way you word things. What to do with the awkward enquiry. None of that arrives in the box, and all of it has to come out of your head — which was the one resource you were trying to protect.

Call it a weekend for something simple, honestly. A few weeks of evenings for anything that touches customers. That time is real, and it's yours, and the twenty quid doesn't include it.

Cost two: the correction tax

Every time you fix its output you pay a little. Reading it, spotting what's off, rewriting it, sending it.

There's a ratio worth watching, and it's brutally simple: are you accepting more than you're correcting? If you're rewriting most of what it produces, you haven't bought a tool that saves time — you've bought a slow first draft and a hobby. Some of them are enjoyable hobbies. It's just worth knowing which one you're paying for.

The good version of this ratio improves on its own. Week one you fix nearly everything; week six you barely touch it. If it's week six and you're still rewriting every line, that's your answer, and it won't change by waiting.

Cost three: the extra tab

This one is invisible, and it kills more tools than anything else on the list.

If it lives somewhere other than where the work already happens, it's another login, another place to check, another thing to remember exists. And you will forget it exists — not through laziness, but because attention is the scarcest thing in the building, and a tool that wants a slice of it every day is competing directly with actual customers.

Which is why we're so tedious about this: it should work inside the workflow, not on top of it. The thing should meet the enquiry where the enquiry already lands — your inbox, your WhatsApp, your phone — or it shouldn't exist. A brilliant tool in a tab you never open is worth precisely nothing, and there are a great many of them out there being paid for monthly.

Cost four: who owns it when it breaks

Ask this before you buy, not after: when this does something odd on a bank holiday Monday, whose problem is it?

If the answer is “nobody”, or “the lad who set it up” and the lad has since moved on, then it's already broken — you just haven't found out yet. Unowned systems don't fail on day one. They drift. An out-of-date price. An area you dropped last year. A service you no longer offer, quietly still being promised to strangers.

It's the single most common thing we're called in to fix, and the cost of it never appears on anybody's pricing page.

The honest maths — and when not to bother

Two columns. Left: the subscription for a year, plus your setup hours, plus your correction hours, valued at what your hour is genuinely worth. Right: the hours it hands back per month.

A £20 tool that takes thirty hours to bed in has cost you the better part of a fortnight of evenings before it returns a single hour. That can still be an excellent trade — thirty hours once against two hours a week forever is a very good deal indeed — but only if you did the sum instead of looking at the twenty quid.

And here's where we'll argue against our own interests. One repeated task, low stakes, one person, nothing customer-facing — do it yourself. Off the shelf, this month, no help required. Most operators should start exactly there, and if that's you, we'd rather say so than take your money.

Get someone to build it when it touches customers, money or your reputation; when it needs to know things that currently exist only in your head; or when nobody in the building will own it otherwise. That's the honest line, and it's the one we work to.

This week's homework: the Real Number

Take one thing — something you already pay for, or something you're being sold.

Left column: the annual subscription. Your hours to set it up. Your hours a month correcting it. Put a real figure on your hour; if you haven't got one, use what you'd have to pay someone else to do your job badly.

Right column: the hours it gives back each month. One number.

If you can't fill the right column with a number, you're not ready to buy it — not because it's a bad product, but because nobody has yet told you what it removes. That's the Pitch Test from Issue #6, holding a calculator.

Do this on the things you're already paying for first. That's usually where the surprise is.

If you'd like a straight answer on something specific, tell us what you're considering and we'll say whether it's worth building, worth buying off the shelf, or worth leaving alone. We say the third one more often than you'd expect from the people who'd be paid for the first.

And hit reply — we read every one. What are you currently paying for that you're not certain is earning it? No judgement. We've all got one.

Built by operators, for operators.

— Kane & George