Is your ERP worth fixing, replacing, or building custom?

We've had hundreds of conversations with business owners in distribution, manufacturing, and construction who all had the same problem: they knew their software was holding them back, but they couldn't put a number on it and they didn't know which route made the most sense for their business.

We built this calculator so you can get that clarity on your costs and compare those costs to a tailored, custom ERP build.

You don't need any technical knowledge to fill this out. You'll be asked about hours spent on manual work, customers lost to system limits, and what that time could earn. Estimates are great! You don't need exact numbers. The calculator is designed for business owners and operators; no IT team required.

We'll outline the cost of your current system, and compare it to a typical off-the-shelf ERP implementation (think: NetSuite, SAP, Acumatica, etc.) We don't require an email or phone number to fill it out. We hope you'll reach out if we can serve you, but won't hound you if you choose to take your results and run! If you read this FAQ and you've filled out the calculator: you should request some Cookies!

We focus on the "ERP" industries: US-based construction, distribution, manufacturing, and service businesses, typically between $5M-$100M in revenue.

We include quotes above our calculator from people who never paid us a dime but got immense value from our consultation. The companies who do pay us tend to get brand new systems operating in this business, with nearly zero disruption, within 1-2 years on average.

You shouldn't blindly trust any software vendor.

However, we do have some good ratings on public software marketplaces that require proof in order to be eligible to be rated:

#1 Rated Software Vendor on Bark

10x Category Leader Awards on Clutch

We'd also be happy to connect vetted prospects with any of our clients so you can do your own due diligence.

Beyond that, we offer ridiculously good refund guarantees. We try to push all the chips forward to make working with us as close to zero-risk as possible!

Plus, we try really hard to bribe people with cookies. It's hard to fake that kind of enthusiasm!

A flat monthly rate, customized to the scope of your engagement. The model is intentionally cheaper than hiring a senior US developer in-house ($120K to $200K plus benefits) and more flexible. You scale up or down month to month. Exact pricing comes out of the free consultation, once we understand the scope.

Compared to your favorite date night—yes. However, when compared against the year 1 and year 10 costs of an off-the-shelf ERP implementation, you may be surprised to know custom can often be cheaper in the long haul.

A senior US developer costs $120K to $200K a year plus benefits, equipment, and recruiting time. Beyond that, talented senior US developers are hard to find and hard to keep. With us, a developer drops into your business at a flat monthly rate, with the rest of our team available behind them as supporting resources. No hiring or HR overhead, and you can scale resources up or down as the work shifts.

Yes. Our whole team is based in the US. No offshoring, no overnight handoffs, no time zone friction. You work with senior US engineers who understand your business in plain English.

Off-the-shelf vendors have the strengths of years of doing things a certain way. Their customizations are usually fairly limited, which leads to increased stability at the cost of fitting your business well.

The risk of a custom ERP depends on how the vendor handling the custom build works.

If they work heads-down for 2 years and then show up with a single, scary cut-over—yes. That's terrifying and shouldn't be how anyone handles a custom build (unfortunately, many do it like this.)

If the custom ERP developer gets your team using the software early, often, and on smaller problems first, the workflows get validated while your team still relies on the existing system for mission-critical workflows. As trust and resiliency is proven (not hoped for—proven) those mission-critical workflows can be taken over by the new system as the old system is slowly transitioned over, piece by piece.

This is a real risk that is managed through good communication, aligned expectations and thorough (which is different from "lengthy") discovery. Typically, by the time we've outlined the North Star, we have a good idea of the general phases of the system migration.

Pilot West Studios gives you access to the code and infrastructure from Day One, so if you determine that we're not fit for the job—you can fire us and have another team take over the system.

Pilot West Studios gives you access to the code and infrastructure from Day One, so if you determine that we're not fit for the job—you can fire us and have another team take over the system.

We offer "Unlimited Off-boarding". In the unlikely event that we've broken trust beyond repair and the only option forward is finding a new team, we will spend as much time as it takes to safely and transparently hand off the project to the new team and ensure you're in good hands.

Technically, these platforms offer customizations. But it's more like choosing a car trim package than building your car from scratch. For many companies, those customizations are sufficient. But for companies that want a simple system tailored to their business—custom can be a cheaper, simpler, long-term choice.

During discovery, you'll likely get tired of hearing us ask, "Why is it like that?" Many times the answers are unknown or simply, "Because it's always been that way." In these moments we have a choice: Forge a new path, or encode the existing choice into code. These choices aren't irreversible, but they do present opportunities to review why you do things the way you do.

Whatever you choose, we work to accommodate your ideal vision for the business whether that be encoding these choices in the software or working to "re-program" the processes in the business.

We hate saying "It depends", but we typically hammer out a v1 in anywhere from 3-9 weeks. The goal is to put something tangible into your hands ASAP so that you can say, "Wow these guys are freakin' awesome" and we can build out the rest of your system from there.

The full, production-ready ERP system usually takes anywhere from 9 months to 2 years depending on complexity.

We offer vetted prospects the opportunity to chat with any of our clients to help them get a sense of cadence, velocity, and working with Pilot West Studios.

We suggest nothing less.

We do not do "big bang" migrations that result in cutting over an entire production system in a single day (there are some situations where this is unavoidable, but we spend a LOT of time working to minimize or avoid this situation.)

We will slowly migrate features and functionalities out of the old system until the old system can be fully decommissioned.

All historical data is securely kept intact. We try to structure migrations to make the new system incapable of losing historical data.

To date we have never lost a single customer record during a system migration.

We hope you'll let us maintain your system after launch, though there's no requirement for that. We offer a "Continuous Care" service that smoothly transitions you from active development while still allowing you to request features, bug fixes, and changes at a low monthly rate. This also includes all the hosting and infrastructure costs baked into the monthly rate.

You own your code from Day One, and we don't require contracts. You are free to take the code that you own and have any other team work on it.

Our goal is to provide top-notch service so that you don't want to find other companies to work on it.

We offer "Unlimited Off-boarding". In the unlikely event that we've broken trust beyond repair and the only option forward is finding a new team, we will spend as much time as it takes to safely and transparently hand off the project to the new team and ensure you're in good hands.

Generally, no. Pilot West Studios can handle all of the technical requirements of your ERP. However, if you have an internal IT team and would like them involved in the process of building and auditing the system, we welcome collaboration.

We tailor our written guarantees to each client. We're happy to dump all of our guarantees into a structured legal document approved by your legal team.

A thirty-minute consultation call lets us outline your North Star, the one business objective your software should be moving. Most people arrive asking for a specific thing: a new ERP, a portal, a workflow tool, and leave with a clear, measurable path to improvement. We help you talk through what you're actually trying to solve, then walk through whether custom software is the right path. If something off-the-shelf would do the job, or if the underlying issue isn't really a software problem, we tell you, and point you toward the right solution. Either way, you leave with clarity.

We've worked across industries with compliance baselines, including healthcare data, financial data, and internal audit requirements. On the free consultation we dig into the specifics of your environment and tell you honestly whether we can meet them. If we can't, we say so.

Yes. We allow vetted prospects that we've confirmed are serious about working with us to contact any of our clients past or current to have a conversation about anything and everything that concerns you.