Programmer as a service for small companies. Soar or not?

Story about a friend

One of my friends, finishing university 10 years ago, got a job in a pharmacy chain for a programmer position.

The company then used 1C accounting and a few more samopisny programs. And all other management and accounting processes in back office were done in Excel or on paper. A friend was assigned the task of automating some accounting operations. For example, before his arrival, every day one person called 130 pharmacies and asked for a couple of numbers.

Without thinking twice, comrade realized that this is a great situation to learn how to do projects and become a professional web programmer. He convinced management to create a corporate web portal for managing the company. Showed that existing solutions are poorly suited to the specifics of the company's processes. And the automation of the process went at full speed!
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Tasks were different: project management, business processes, management accounting, reporting. In general, what was on paper and in Excel was transferred to the web. For two years he quietly studied web technologies and automating accounting processes. Not bad pumped in web development and went to a development company with a salary increase. The company was left with a student level system and a bunch of noodle code. They had to hire a new developer who decided to rewrite everything from scratch.

The problem of business automation with small resources

I heard such stories several times. Often the company has no money to create a serious development team, while the processes are poorly formalized. Facing the need for automation, the company chooses from the following options:

1. Hire a developer.
2. Order a solution from the studio or hire an integrator.
3. Take advantage of ready-made service.
4. Leave everything as it is and suffer.

Our team is trying to bring to the market another alternative to students - the Programmer as a service.

The essence

We create an online account application designer. The most frequent case for customers who come to us: the problem is to create a TK and imagine what a working system might look like.

Our solution: let the customer communicate with our systems analyst, who

• ask the right questions
• will help write the first version of the TK,
• will assemble on our designer the first working version of the accounting system.

And all this for 1 month and 20 thousand rubles (this amount eliminates those who, in principle, are not ready to pay and who do not really hurt).

This is how we show ourselves to customers:

	Software development from scratch	Our application designer
The need to keep on staff analysts and programmers	Yes	The analyst programmer is paid only when he is working on your application.
Maintenance and server maintenance	Yes	Payment for the service is much cheaper than maintaining your own server. Your data is backed up daily (saved).
Development time and refinement	First version: 2-3 months Revision: week.	First version: 2 weeks Revision: 1-2 days.
Ready function blocks	Sample blocks need to develop from scratch, buy or search	The designer has typical functional blocks ready: tables and forms, business process designer, reports and charts.
Integration with other systems	Need to develop	The designer is able to load data from other databases, Excel, 1C. There is a Rest API that allows you to easily integrate your application with other systems and services.

Conclusion

I wonder what Habrovites think about this topic. Soar or not?

Someone tried to do similar services?

Our hypothesis: Small companies need not a programmer, but a result.

We are not talking about large IT solutions that fully automate the company, we take only specific tasks to replace Excel, Access and create accounting and reporting systems on the web.
There are first sales and satisfied customers.