I work for a medium-sized business in an out-of-touch (technologically speaking) industry.

You would not believe the shit we pay for.

Were our company in need of a way to cross the street, we would almost certainly look for a vendor supported crosswalk, plus consultants to guide us through crossing the street the first few times, and training for our designated crosswalk guard.

And I'm not even convinced they're doing it wrong. People are expensive. Most the time Build vs Buy is a no-brainer for everything but your absolute core business, and even then you should wonder if custom software really will differentiate you from the rest of the market.

Honestly? I wish I had seen Storemapper a few months ago. We were in the middle of a website redesign and the board president decided he didn't like the map. He got the CEO involved who told the CIO who told... you get the idea. Storemapper would've been pure win that day.

If it saves more time than it costs, it's a good deal for everyone involved.

At $19/mo, even if it only took me day as a developer to create my own, I'd rather just buy the service for a year. I'll get a more polished version, I don't have to maintain it, and I can go do something more productive instead since I'm not actually in the business of creating store maps, I just needed the one. If you don't have in-house developers, like a retail operation might not have, the value proposition becomes even clearer.

I know right. Big thanks to patio11 for convincing me (via blog posts and tweets) that, yes, many businesses will pay quite a bit more than you think for things like a store locator

Would you rather:

Hire a developer with a salary, benefits, and tax to build this module plus project mgmt time for requirements building, testing, training, documentation, sustain, etc.

Pay $60/month and 1/10th of an FTE to plug it into existing assets and sustain it.

What would be the alternative if you can't implement it yourself? Pay a developer a hefty one time sum? And then probably all few years another developer again to update it? Thereby getting a product which isn't as feature rich as the Saas version? And probably increase the required administration effort for your website hosting. Doesn't sound like a good alternative, especially if you are an startup which might be not around next year anymore.

They have to. The functionality is table-stakes for any business selling a physical products in stores, and no site or store platform has the functionality built-in.

I implemented Storemapper for a few clients (indie sellers and major brands), and they absolutely loved it b/c it solved their exact problem and cost next to nothing.

'I could do this. Why would I pay for it?' only works for people with copious free time.

This is something that any business with multiple locations needs. Why reinvent the wheel if someone has already solved the problem? At $60/mo it's not even a blip on the budget, and almost surely far cheaper than having a developer build and maintain a one-off version.