Nobody shares those hours with you
A ready-made program is paid for by a lot of people, each putting in a share, and whoever sells it recovers the development hours across the whole crowd, you pay a small slice of something built once and for all. Custom work is paid for by you alone, because it's built on your process, with your rules, inside the programs you use, and there is nobody else to spread those hours over
When the quote looks high to you, the comparison you are making in your head is with a subscription to a product plenty of people buy, and it isn't the same trade
Where the hours actually go
The part everyone pictures, writing the code, isn't the part that weighs most
Before writing a line you have to understand the process, and understanding it properly means watching how the person who has done it for years does it, not being told the textbook version. Then come the odd cases, the supplier who writes the amounts his own way, the job that follows a rule nobody ever wrote down, and you don't find those cases by asking, you find them by going through the real jobs one after another
Then there are the checks, the part nobody sees and that is worth half the job, because a system that writes data without verifying it is more dangerous than the person it replaces. You need the reconciliations, the comparisons, the conditions beyond which the system stops instead of guessing, and every one of those conditions is a decision taken and tested
Then it gets tested, and testing means running it next to the person on the same cases until the results match, not opening it once and saying it works
And then there is maintenance, the line almost nobody puts in the quote and the one thing that is certain: the business software gets updated, the portal moves a button, the supplier changes the invoice template, and on that day somebody has to put things back in order, otherwise what you spent is thrown away
A high price all at the start moves the risk onto you
The problem with custom software isn't so much how much it costs, it's when you pay for it
In the classic arrangement you hand over a large sum before you have seen a single screen work, and from that moment the risk is yours, because if the process was more complicated than expected, or if the work ends and then nobody follows it any more, you have paid all the same. Whoever wrote the software has already been paid, you are still waiting to see whether you need it
A monthly fee turns this round, and it isn't a commercial courtesy, it's that a monthly fee matches the shape of the work better. Muffin Suite agrees the fee before the rollout, with no large upfront cost, and it covers development, use, support, fixes and maintenance, while the length and the terms are set out in the project contract. The supplier stays tied to the thing going on working, because if it stops working the reason you pay for it stops as well
On the comparison between the two roads, with the real merits of each, there is a separate guide, while the subscription page explains how the fee is put together
The plain old test still stands, what you spend has to come in under what you stop spending, with a margin you can see at a glance