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Off the shelf solution or custom

Hello fellow hackers,

I am currently building Comix (https://comix.life) , a marketplace for independent comic makers. We want to have a dedicated place where people cab discover content from community and not from syndicates. The dilemma I'm facing at the moment is whether i should go for an off the shelf solution or a custom one. My current pace of development has been extremely slow mainly because my day job is extremely hectic and I'm a new father. On most evenings I have not more than an hour to dedicate.

The other day I came across Arcadier (https://arcadier.com) for building marketplaces. I signed up for a free trial. I quickly realised some limitations of the solution. Here is what I found :

Pros:

  • works with stripe
  • unlimited amount of users even in basic plan
  • quick Goto market solution
  • basic plan is reasonably priced. 39$ if billed monthly and 30$ if billed yearly.

Cons:

  • no way to export data of any sort. So you have to rely on them to run your mailing lists and CRM stuff. It also makes it harder to migrate data to custom solution.
  • to get access to thei API you have to pay 150$ a month and that's the only way to access your data.
  • no SSL in basic plan. I will have to jump from 39$ pm to 79$ pm.
  • themes are not properly responsive. To do any customisation I'll have to jump to 79$ pm.

Do you think I should consider this solution or a custom one to launch ? The only big con to a custom solution I see is that it takes time to build a product even mvp.

Thanks a lot in advance folks.