[PopeDotNinja]

One thing to point out is that there are varying degrees of customs. Every client project is custom in the sense that they all have different pics, layouts, colors, et., but the underlying technology may be the same (e.g. Wordpress). The more you can use off the self components and just tweak them, the more predictable a project will be. This type of work tends to be very competitive & you’ll often hear that it’s a race to the bottom. While the quality of Wordpress implementations can vary drastically, it can be difficult for a client to understand those differences, which makes it challenging to sell premium services.

When work is truly custom, and you’re building much of it from scratch (e.g. using Ruby on Rails with extensive amounts of custom design and business logic), this can be much more expensive. It’s quite difficult to find good developers who can help you figure out what you need, come up with a plan that you’re comfortable with, and actually deliver something you’ll be happy with.

[sirspacey]

The profit window is where clients see the work as custom while the implementation is off-the-shelf.

Twitter Bootstrap was a great example for a few years. Clients got “custom” apps/websites and front-end devs could stitch together libraries pretty fast.