Why we build eleven products instead of one platform
The efficient answer is one platform, configured per industry. It is the answer most software companies eventually give, because maintaining one codebase is cheaper than maintaining eleven. We have gone the other way, and the reason is not sentiment.
2 min readOadbox
Configuration is work that has to happen somewhere
A horizontal platform is genuinely capable of running a school, a hospital or a fleet. What it cannot do is arrive knowing any of them. Someone has to encode admission workflows, fee heads, discharge summaries or trip sheets — and that someone is either an implementation partner billing by the day or the customer's own operations lead.
The work does not disappear. It moves to the party least equipped to do it, and it gets done once, badly, by someone who will not be there in two years to explain the choices.
Defaults are the product
When software knows its industry, the value shows up as defaults: the fee heads a school actually uses, the reject reasons a machine shop actually records, the document checklist a developer actually collects before registration.
Those defaults come from having built the thing eleven times in one sector, not from a configuration screen. They are also what makes a two-week go-live possible, because most of the setup is already correct.
The honest cost
Eleven products means eleven roadmaps, eleven support queues and eleven sets of release notes. It is more expensive to run and it forecasts worse. We think it is the right trade, but it is a trade, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something.
The thing it buys is specificity — and specificity is the only durable advantage available to a smaller company competing against much larger ones.
Written by the Oadbox team. Something here not match how it works in your business? We would genuinely like to hear it — connect@oadbox.com.