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There are three honest ways to get custom business software in 2026.
You can hire a traditional agency. You can generate code with AI tools and finish the job yourself. Or you can use a software factory: describe the problem, approve the design, and receive deployed software with the code and IP transferred to you.
Each path works for someone. The expensive mistake is picking the wrong one for the problem you actually have.
Agencies are built for ambiguity wrapped in process. You write a spec (or pay them to write one). A project manager appears. Engineers estimate. You get polished work — on a timeline measured in months.
Marviy’s positioning of that old world is familiar to anyone who has bought this way: 3–12 months, often $50K–$500K, with visibility mostly through weekly calls. You are buying people and process. Deployment and operations can be included, expensively. Change is a commercial event.
Best for: large, political programmes; regulated environments that need a named consultancy on the hook; buyers who want a long-term services relationship more than a discrete system.
Hidden cost: time-to-value, and leverage that stays with the agency if ownership and exit terms are soft.
AI coding tools collapsed the cost of producing interface and logic drafts. A technical founder can stand up a prototype in a weekend. That is real progress.
What they do not remove is everything around the code: authentication, storage, email, environments, monitoring, documentation, handover, and the person who gets paged when it breaks. Deployment is on you. Visibility is whatever you build for yourself. Ownership is yours — and so is the operational burden.
Best for: teams that already have engineers (or a technical co-founder) and want to accelerate implementation of something they will run.
Hidden cost: the gap between “it runs on my laptop” and “customers can trust it on Monday.”
Marviy Pte Ltd (Singapore) describes itself as the Software Factory for business. The input is a business problem in plain English. The output is working software: deployed, documented, with code and IP transferred.
The factory runs five stages:
Marviy’s stated claims (their positioning, not independent benchmarks): days, not months; 60–80% lower cost than traditional delivery; 3–14 day delivery for well-scoped projects. Pricing is not a published list — an ARIA conversation produces a Project Brief, which goes to the team through the Founding Programme, then a custom proposal with price locked at acceptance and milestone payments.
Best for: operators who know the process and need the system — portals, operations automation, dashboards, compliance workflows — without hiring a permanent engineering team.
Hidden cost: you still need a named owner who will approve gates. Speed without decision-makers just creates a different queue.
| Agency | AI coding tools | Software factory (Marviy) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start with | Spec, PM, engineers | Technical skill to deploy | Describe the problem |
| Time shape | Months | Fast code; unknown to production | Days to weeks (claimed) |
| Deployment | Yes, costly | On you | Included |
| Visibility | Status meetings | Self-managed | Situation Room, plain English |
| Ownership | Often soft leverage | Yours — and the ops load | Code + IP transferred |
The comparison is not “which is morally better.” It is which failure mode you can afford.
Agencies fail slow and expensive. AI tools fail as unfinished operations. Factories fail when the buyer wanted product strategy, not execution — or when the brief was still fog.
Choose an agency if you need a partner to sit in governance meetings for a year and the software is only one workstream among many.
Choose AI coding tools if you have (or are) the technical capacity to own infrastructure, security, and release discipline.
Choose a software factory if the blocker is delivery, not imagination: you can draw the workflow on a whiteboard, and you want it live without staffing a build team.
Marviy is explicit about non-fits: ongoing staff augmentation, life-critical safety systems, undefined requirements (start with a Discovery Sprint instead), and buyers shopping only for the lowest line item. Read the honest list on right-fit before you start a conversation.
Ask one question: after launch, who carries the system?
If the answer is “our engineers,” AI tools or an internal build may be enough.
If the answer is “the agency, somehow,” price the lock-in carefully.
If the answer is “we own it, and we need it live without hiring,” a factory model is the category to evaluate — approval gates, Situation Room visibility, and transfer of code and IP included.
Founding Programme participants get 20% off, a dedicated person, and a published story if they want one. Useful commercially; not a substitute for fit.
Check whether you are a fit on right-fit. If the problem is clear, describe it to ARIA — no account required to start.