Fiber Network Planning Software: Build or Buy at Your Passings
The threshold is roughly 25,000 passings a year, and it is about iteration rather than volume. Below it, a design engagement with Comsof or Biarri beats a build on both cost and time and the money is better spent in the ground.
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The threshold is roughly 25,000 passings a year, and it is about iteration rather than volume. Below it, a design engagement with Comsof or Biarri beats a build on both cost and time and the money is better spent in the ground. Above it, if a change to the take rate assumption currently sends a designer back into computer aided design for a week, owning the engine turns that into an afternoon. Most operators building one market once fall below the line. Operators designing continuously across several markets fall above it.
When is off the shelf genuinely the right call here?
More often than the industry admits. If you build a few thousand passings a year in one town with a fixed architecture, engage Comsof Fiber or Biarri Networks as a service and stop reading. Both do automated design genuinely well, both can be bought as software or as a design engagement, and for a single market build an engagement is faster and cheaper than anything you could commission. We would say that on the call, and we have.
The same logic applies to the layer underneath. 3-GIS, IQGeo and VETRO FiberMap are network records and field operations platforms, and they are the right tools for holding the plant record, the structures and the strand assignments. A custom design engine should feed them rather than compete with them, and any proposal to rebuild that layer is a proposal to spend a lot of money arriving where you already are. Bentley OpenComms sits in the computer aided design lineage and is a reasonable answer if drawings are genuinely your deliverable.
Buy also if your architecture is settled. If you split centrally at a fixed ratio, build underground everywhere, and have no meaningful existing plant to reuse, the standard patterns fit you and configuring a product will not feel like fighting it. The reason operators build is rarely that the commercial optimisation is bad. It is that the rules are theirs.
When does a custom build actually pay off?
When design stops being a campaign and becomes a continuous function, and when the business case gets rebuilt against changing assumptions faster than a service engagement can turn around.
Build when two or more of these hold. You design continuously at scale rather than in one campaign. Your architecture rules differ enough from the standard patterns that configuring a product means fighting it, for example distributed splitting in low density areas and centralised in multi dwelling clusters, with your own reach conventions. Your cost model needs to be spatial and derived from your own completed jobs rather than from benchmark rates. You have substantial existing conduit, poles and dark strands whose reuse materially changes designs. Or your design output has to flow into construction and records systems you already run, in formats those systems define.
The tipping point is control and iteration speed, not design quality. When the board asks what happens at a thirty per cent take rate instead of forty five, or a funding programme changes its eligible location set, owning the engine means answering the same afternoon. Renting it means booking an engagement, and after enough of those the arithmetic changes on its own.
How do they compare on the things that matter in this industry?
Test any option, bought or built, against these.
- Does the design recalculate. A design stored as geometry, meaning drawing layers plus a spreadsheet that sums footage, cannot respond to an input change. A design stored as a graph over a routable network, with premises as demand points and splitters and cabinets as capacitated facilities, can. That single distinction decides whether you produce one design and defend it or compare three.
- Is the cost model spatial. Boring cost changes with soil and rock. Highway and railroad crossings carry their own permits, fees and timelines. Downtown restoration dominates trenching. Make ready on a heavily attached pole route can exceed the fibre cost on that span. A flat unit rate table hides all of it, and an optimiser running on it is optimising against a fiction.
- Can it prefer plant you already own. Spare duct, available strands and reusable poles should enter the model with a reuse cost, including proving and rodding, and with encumbrances respected. Strands committed under a long term agreement are not free even when they look unused.
- What comes out the other end. Permit drawings in each jurisdiction's format, a bill of materials against the part numbers your warehouse stocks, splice schedules, pole applications and work packets scoped to a crew week. The gap between a design and a buildable packet is where programmes slip.
- Validation against a build you already paid for. Hand any vendor or developer one completed build area and ask them to reproduce the design and the cost within a sensible margin. If the engine cannot match a build you already know, planners will override it.
What does total cost of ownership look like at your scale?
In Digital Heroes delivery experience, a first release covering the routing and splitter placement engine with your architecture rules, a spatial cost model and scenario comparison runs $95,000 to $210,000 and ships in 14 to 20 weeks. A full platform adding permit and easement constraints, existing plant reuse, bill of materials generation, construction packets and as built reconciliation runs $260,000 to $600,000 across 9 to 15 months.
The drivers are unusually concrete. Address and parcel data quality adds 20 to 50 per cent, and it is the driver operators dismiss most often. Solver depth ranges from $35,000 for a useful heuristic to $110,000 for joint optimisation across siting, placement, sizing and duct reuse. Existing plant reuse is $30,000 to $75,000. Make ready and pole attachment modelling is $25,000 to $60,000. Each additional build architecture is $18,000 to $45,000. Construction packet output is $20,000 to $55,000. Scenario re runs, the capability that is the whole reason to own rather than rent, cost around $27,000 in a large programme and should be the last line you cut.
A 180,000 passing annual programme across three states with two architectures and three construction partners lands near $592,000 over 56 weeks. Strip construction packets, as built reconciliation and make ready and it is $476,000. One architecture in one state is nearer $300,000.
Running costs are the part that rules smaller programmes out. Solver compute is $600 to $4,500 a month during active design and is bursty by nature. Geospatial data licensing across a multi state footprint is $10,000 to $60,000 a year and has nothing to do with software. Unit cost refreshes are $6,000 to $15,000 a year, and skipping them produces confident business cases priced on last year's labour. Each new market needs $8,000 to $20,000 of solver tuning. Maintenance is 15 to 20 per cent of build cost, so $89,000 to $118,000 on a $592,000 platform. Planner training is $5,000 to $12,000 a year, and an untrusted solver gets overridden manually, at which point you have paid for optimisation and are still designing by hand.
What does the hybrid look like, and when is it the honest answer?
This is the shape most operators should actually pursue, and it has three parts.
Keep the records platform. 3-GIS, IQGeo or VETRO FiberMap holds the plant, the structures and the strand assignments, and your design engine feeds structured output into it. Rebuilding that is a large, low return project.
Build the scenario engine and nothing else in release one. Address and parcel ingestion for one market type, a routing solver following your street network and right of way rules, splitter placement against your architecture, cabinet siting, and a cost per passing computed from your own unit costs. That is $95,000 to $150,000 in 14 to 17 weeks. It produces a defensible business case number and it does not yet produce anything a contractor can build from, which is fine, because your engineering partners are already converting designs by hand today.
Keep buying design as a service for overflow markets. Nothing about owning an engine obliges you to run every market through it. Operators who build the engine for their core footprint and engage Comsof or Biarri for a one off acquisition market are making a sensible decision, not an inconsistent one. The jump from $210,000 to $260,000 is the move from planning to production, and once construction packets come out of your system an error is not a bad estimate, it is a crew standing in the wrong place. Make that jump deliberately, after planners trust the design output.
Which should you choose, by operator size and stage?
Under roughly 10,000 passings a year, one market, fixed architecture. Engage a design service. Put the money in the ground. There is no version of this where a build returns it.
10,000 to 25,000 passings a year, one or two markets. Still engage, but start collecting your own unit costs from completed jobs now, by surface type and jurisdiction. That data is the foundation of any future build and it takes a year to accumulate honestly.
Above roughly 25,000 passings a year, or several markets with different data and cost structures. Build the routing and placement engine with scenario comparison, one market type and one architecture first. Add the second architecture once the first is trusted.
Multi state programmes above 100,000 passings a year with heavy existing plant. The full platform, phased so planners get routing and scenario re runs months before packets and reconciliation land. Budget the geospatial data licensing and the per market solver tuning as standing lines, because they are not one off costs and they are what make a large programme sustainable.
If you would rather scope this before committing budget, Digital Heroes starts every engagement with a signed specification covering the data model, permissions and acceptance criteria, which is what keeps a fixed price fixed. The document is yours whichever way you go.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- Retailers improving Core Web Vitals saw measurable gains: Vodafone improved LCP by 31% for 8% more sales, Lazada saw a 16.9% mobile conversion increase, and Cdiscount saw a 6% Black Friday revenue uplift. Source: web.dev (Google Chrome team) (2021) →
- Poor software quality cost the US economy an estimated $2.41 trillion in 2022, including roughly $1.52 trillion in accumulated technical debt, driven partly by unsuccessful development projects and low-quality legacy systems. Source: Consortium for Information & Software Quality (CISQ) - Herb Krasner (2022) →
- The NRF discontinued its long-running annual shrink report, stating that a broad study of retail shrink 'is no longer sufficient for capturing the key challenges and needs of the industry' - important context that qualifies how POS/shrink benchmarks should be cited going forward. Source: Retail Dive (2024) →
- IBM frames first-time fix rate as a core field service KPI, noting the industry average sits around 80% (roughly one in five jobs needs a return visit). Correction: IBM cites best-in-class providers at 89-98%, not '85%+'. Source: IBM (2024) →
Frequently asked questions
Should we just use Comsof or Biarri instead of building?
If you build a few thousand passings a year in one town with a fixed architecture, yes, decisively. A service engagement with either beats a build on cost and time, and both do automated design well.
Building earns its cost above roughly 25,000 passings a year, particularly when you run several markets with different data and cost structures and need one comparable cost per passing across all of them, or when your architecture rules mean configuring a product feels like fighting it.
What does it cost to switch off a design service onto our own engine?
The engineering is the visible half. The hidden half is capturing rules that currently live in senior designers' habits rather than in a written standard, plus conditioning address and parcel data per market, which is where 20 to 50 per cent of the budget goes.
Run both in parallel for one build area. Redesign a market your service partner already delivered and compare cost per passing before you retire the engagement.
What happens if our records platform vendor changes pricing or its interface?
Your design engine should treat the records platform as a downstream consumer of structured output rather than as a dependency it cannot function without. That way a vendor change is an export format change, not a redesign.
Own the repository, the cloud accounts and the design data itself from the first commit. Your unit cost library and your rule set are the assets, and they should never live only inside somebody else's product.
How long does a first release take?
Fourteen to 17 weeks for the routing and placement engine, 17 to 20 weeks for a complete first release adding a second architecture, scenario comparison and a unit cost library your own team maintains.
The two schedule risks are data preparation, since municipal centreline and parcel data usually needs cleaning before it forms a reliable routable graph, and rule capture. Operators with a documented design standard move considerably faster.
Do we need a full optimisation solver, or is a heuristic enough?
A heuristic that places splitters and sizes cable sensibly costs $35,000 to $50,000 and delivers most of the first year value, because the win is being able to re run at all rather than the last few percent of optimality.
Full joint optimisation across cabinet siting, splitter placement, cable sizing and duct reuse runs to $110,000. Start with the heuristic and upgrade once planners trust the output enough to stop overriding it.
Will a custom engine replace our 3-GIS or IQGeo records system?
No, and it should not try. Those platforms are the right tools for network records and field operations, and they are good at that job.
The value of a custom engine sits upstream: generating and comparing designs quickly under your own rules and your own spatial costs, then handing structured output into the systems you already run. Competing with them is an expensive way to end up with a worse records platform.
What does existing plant reuse add, and is it worth it?
Thirty thousand to $75,000, and the saving is usually the largest single benefit in the build if your plant record is trustworthy. Teaching the solver to prefer spare duct, existing poles and dark strands means modelling what reuse genuinely costs, including proving and rodding, rather than marking it free.
Where record confidence is low, the design should flag a reuse assumption for field verification. That verification queue directs survey effort at the places where the money is.
What is the one capability we should refuse to cut?
Scenario re runs. The reason to own the software rather than buy design as a service is that a change to the take rate assumption produces a new design the same afternoon instead of a new engagement.
It costs around $27,000 in a large programme. Cut construction packets, cut the second architecture, cut make ready modelling, and keep this. Without it you have bought a slow way to produce one design.
How do I vet a software development agency before signing a contract?
Ask to speak with two past clients whose projects resemble yours in size and industry, and ask exactly who will write your code, since some agencies sell senior faces and deliver junior or subcontracted hands. Demand a written specification with acceptance criteria before any fixed price, and check that their portfolio links to products that are actually live. An instant quote given without questions about your workflows is the clearest warning sign there is.
We run everything on Airtable and spreadsheets. When is it time to go custom?
The switch usually makes sense when you hit one of two walls: Airtable's record caps (125,000 records per base on the Business plan) or logic the tool cannot express, like multi-step approvals with conditional pricing. There is also a simple cost signal: 25 people on Business at roughly $45 per seat per month is about $13,500 a year, forever, for a tool you are already fighting. Custom is worth it when the workflow is core to how you make money; for peripheral processes, staying on Airtable is the right call.
How many people should be working on my software project?
A typical $40,000 to $150,000 build runs on three to five people: a technical lead, one or two developers, a designer, and someone owning QA and project communication, often as overlapping part-time roles. More bodies do not make software arrive faster; past a point they slow it down with coordination overhead. The question that matters more than headcount is whether one named senior engineer is accountable for the outcome.
Should I ask for a fixed price or pay the agency hourly?
Fixed price for the first version, hourly or retainer for what comes after launch. A fixed-scope, fixed-price V1 puts the estimation risk on the agency, which is exactly where you want it while trust is unproven; hourly billing on an unscoped greenfield build is a blank check. After launch, flip it, because maintenance and small features arrive unpredictably and fixed-pricing every ticket wastes everyone's time.
How many SaaS seats do we need before building custom becomes cheaper?
The crossover usually shows up between 20 and 50 seats on premium tiers. Salesforce Enterprise lists at $165 per user per month, so 40 users cost about $79,000 a year in subscriptions, which is real money against a custom system you would own outright. Run the comparison over three years: if subscription spend beats the build cost plus 15-20% annual maintenance, custom wins on price before you even count workflow fit.
Will custom software work with the tools we already use, like QuickBooks and Stripe?
Yes, and this is one of custom software's genuine advantages: QuickBooks, Stripe, Shopify, and most mainstream business tools publish documented APIs built for exactly this. Expect each standard integration to add one to two weeks of build time, and be suspicious of any quote that lists five integrations without asking what data flows in which direction. The hard cases are legacy systems with no API, which is a question to raise in discovery, not in week nine.
Couldn't I just build my app in Bubble or another no-code tool instead of hiring an agency?
For validating an idea with real users, yes, and we tell clients that honestly. The walls come later: Bubble apps cannot be exported as code to run anywhere else, performance drops on complex data operations, and usage-based pricing climbs as you grow. A meaningful share of Digital Heroes custom builds are rebuilds of no-code MVPs that proved the business worked, which is the system operating as intended: validate cheap, then build the version that scales.
Our developer disappeared mid-project. Can another team pick up the code?
Yes, this is a routine engagement, provided the code exists somewhere you can access, so your first move is securing the repository, hosting, and domain credentials today. A takeover starts with a one to two week paid code audit that ends in one of three verdicts: continue the build, keep the design but rebuild the weak parts, or start over. Digital Heroes has inherited enough projects to say plainly that sometimes the rebuild is cheaper than the rescue, and an honest agency will tell you which one you have before taking your money.
What should I prepare before contacting a software development agency?
A one-page brief beats a 40-page requirements document: the business problem in plain words, who will use the system, the 5 to 10 workflows it must handle, the tools it must connect to, and your budget range and deadline driver. You do not need wireframes, a specification, or technical vocabulary; producing those is the agency's job during discovery. Stating a budget range up front is the single best move, because it gets you honest scoping instead of a quote engineered to win the meeting.
Who can build a custom software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
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