| A company I was at for nearly a decade did just this, a few times... kind of. We never fully transitioned to the SaaS versions of whatever software we were building for customers, and ended up with a "base" software that we would then just tweak to the customers spec. It wasn't a bad model by any means, and we ended up turning what had been 3-4 month projects into 1 week, and charging the same amount. One product was an emergency communications platform for city government, another was a CMS/CRM/Website Builder for RV dealers, another was a blogging/sales platform for interior designers. We had a half dozen base products that we sold to hundreds of clients for a few thousand a piece. We had enough individual customers in each of these spaces to build all these semi-custom solutions based on shared codebases, but we could never find enough customers paying a LOT less per month to afford spending time on the SaaS versions. We were a tiny team of only 3 though, if we had some venture capital maybe things would have turned out differently. We eventually moved out of doing "custom" software though, and into consulting on SEO and Brand Reputation, then finally into launching our in-house software as SaaS offerings, growing our service business from around $200k ARR to between $30k and $90k MRR. You can read some of that journey in the second half of a blog post I wrote a while back[1]. 1: https://jeremyaboyd.micro.blog/2016/11/05/my-first-product.h... |