Building your own DMC software: what does it really cost?
AI made writing code cheap. But writing code was never the expensive part of DMC software.
· Alix Papeloux
AI made writing code cheap. The trouble is, writing code was never the expensive part. Before you start, here is what homemade DMC software really costs over time.
A prototype comes together fast
With an AI assistant, a few hours are now enough to get a first quote tool that works: a form, a price, a PDF. Three years ago, that took a developer and a budget.
The prototype is not the problem. The problem is what it makes you believe about the years that follow.
The quote is the easy part
You can build a quote tool because you can describe it out loud. The rest of the system is what you discover once your team uses it for real.
- Supplier rates and seasons
- Margins and currencies
- Quote versions
- Sold quote turned into a file
- Supplier bookings and chasers
- Last-minute changes
- Multilingual roadbooks
- Deposits, balances, supplier payments
- VAT and personal data
None of these pieces is hard on its own. The cost is that they all have to stay consistent with each other, for years, while your business keeps moving.
The six lines of the real cost
- 01The people who build itSalaries, freelancers or an agency: months of invoices before a usable version.
- 02Your own timeSeasonal rules, client exceptions, VAT, testing: someone on your team writes them instead of selling.
- 03MaintenanceFixes, hosting, security, changes: it never stops.
- 04Project riskDelays, overruns, reduced scope: the bigger the project, the more exposed it is.
- 05Dependence on one personWhen the person who understands the system leaves, nobody can change it.
- 06Data security and hostingServers, backups, access, breaches, GDPR compliance: you are accountable.
The people who build it are the most visible line, because someone invoices you. It is not the heaviest one.
Your own time appears in no budget. Nobody can describe a DMC system better than someone who runs one. So it is you, or your head of operations, who spends weeks on it.
Maintenance lasts as long as the software does. You do not buy software once: you look after it, every year.
Project risk is managed mostly through scope: a small, targeted project succeeds far more often than a full rebuild.
Dependence on one person shows up last, and it is often the one that hurts most.
Data security and hosting are often forgotten. Your files hold names, passports, travel dates and sometimes health data. You have to choose where that data is hosted, apply security updates, back it up, manage access and react if there is a breach. The GDPR (Article 32) requires appropriate security measures, and ENISA publishes practical guidance. If data leaves the European Union, transfer rules also apply.
What AI really changes
AI helps, that is a fact. But the measurements are more nuanced than people think. In early 2025, a randomised trial by METR found that experienced open-source developers were 19% slower with AI tools, while believing they had gained around 20%. In February 2026, METR said developers are probably faster today, but the gap has become hard to measure.
Trust, meanwhile, went down. In the Stack Overflow 2025 survey, 84% of developers use or plan to use AI, and 46% distrust the accuracy of its output. Their top frustration: code that is "almost right". For a DMC, an almost-right quote is one that runs, looks fine… and has the wrong margin.
In short, AI shortens the writing of code. It does nothing for scoping, edge cases, data migration, a Friday night in August when three suppliers have not confirmed, or the years of maintenance.
"€50,000, but at least it's mine"
A one-off payment feels cleaner than a subscription. Yet it is also a monthly cost: it just arrives all at once. To compare, spread the amount over 36 months.
The formula: (amount spent + time spent by your team × its hourly cost) ÷ 36 + monthly maintenance = real monthly cost over three years. For example, €36,000 spent, with no time or maintenance, already works out to €1,000 a month.
This figure includes what you spent, your team’s time and maintenance. What remains is who takes care of everything else:
When building is the right call
Building your own software can be the right call for very large organisations with a genuinely specific way of working, a dedicated budget and an IT director to run the project over time.
For other DMCs, it is an option to consider, no more. If a need is truly specific to your agency, build that one small module instead and connect it to your main software.
The real question is not "can we build it?". It is "do we want to carry its maintenance, when our job is selling trips?"
The other half of the equation
You now have a monthly cost for building. The missing half is what the software is worth to you. The Odys ROI calculator estimates that value from your agency's numbers, with every assumption visible. You can also browse Odys features.