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Most studios shouldn’t buy custom software. Here’s the honest version of each alternative — who it suits, and where it stops working.
Spreadsheets + group chat
Studios of one or two people with a handful of clients. Nothing to learn, nothing to pay.
When status lives in one person’s head, rounds get lost in threads, and month-end means rebuilding what was delivered.
General project tools
Teams whose work really is a list of tasks with owners and due dates.
They don’t know what a round, an allowance or an overage is. Studios end up bending boards to fit and keeping billing somewhere else.
Review and approval tools
Precise client feedback on a cut. If that’s your bottleneck, use one.
They cover the review, not the pipeline, capacity or invoicing around it. One can sit alongside Studio OS rather than instead of it.
Off-the-shelf agency software
Larger agencies happy to adopt a ready-made workflow.
Per-seat pricing, features you never open, and a process you adapt to instead of the other way round.
Hiring an agency to build it
Big budgets and long roadmaps with many moving parts.
Usually a longer timeline and a bigger budget, with handovers between people who build it and people who designed it.
The other side
If you’re under three people, a well-kept spreadsheet is probably enough. If your work doesn’t run in client rounds, this isn’t shaped for you.
If you need it next week, or you want a tool for two hundred people, I’m the wrong fit. I’d rather tell you that on the call than after an invoice.
Tell me how your studio tracks projects today. If software isn’t the answer, I’ll say so on the call — that happens often enough to be worth mentioning.
