What are your options?

There is now a proliferation of free or cheap web-based tools available for individuals and businesses to help them collaborate, share information, promote themselves and manage their key business functions. In previous years these technologies have been too unreliable to risk running major business services from them, however, they are now proving more reliable than self-hosted solutions and offer excellent functionality to businesses at a fraction of the cost of developing something from scratch. If appropriate integration can be achieved between all the various tools available, then much of the functionality of an enterprise-level website can now be leveraged for a few hundred pounds in installation costs. And their functionality is expanding all the time. Here are the basic options:

Free. Sites like Facebook and Twitter will let you use their robust, supported, fully user-tested platforms for free, because you are bringing them more users. They will find their own ways to make money later from the people you bring them, perhaps through advertising or paid-for additional services. Colalife used Facebook, Wordpress, Twitter, and a Google Group.

Cheap. Companies like Ning, Yammer and Typepad ask you to pay a small subscription fee for their services, whilst others charge for pro services on top of their basic free offering. Again, they handle the support and hosting, so you don’t need in-house technical resources. SavvyChavvy and TuDiabetes both used Ning.

Customised. You can license a proprietary package from a software vendor and pay them to customise it, but the smarter way to go these days is open source. Open source development means sharing what you build, which means you can start from a free core that someone else has built and adopt or evolve it. You get a tailored solution for less, and the more you share, and the bigger the community, the more you get back for free later. You have to handle your own development and hosting though, but it’s usually much easier and cheaper to find people to help you. Talk2Croydon commissioned their system from open source Drupal developers.

Bespoke. The last resort. Building software from scratch is expensive, risky (unless you manage it very carefully), and can leave you at the mercy of those who build them for you. But if you can afford the time and money involved, you can get exactly what you need, and your competitors don’t. Patient Opinion and IDeA chose this route successfully.

Financially, the equation is straightforward: the more generic your requirements, the cheaper the solution. And often you can get more for free as an individual or community than you could ever construct from scratch as an organisation.