I'm curious to know peoples' thoughts on how the future bodes for firms providing custom web development as a service? in a time when things are increasingly being commoditized and automated.<p>The likes of squarespace, shopify, wordpress etc serve standard website needs pretty well these days. For more functional and complex sites or apps, custom development is still a necessity. But will that always be the case?<p>I've been thinking about this and it feels like there'll always be space for custom development but that scope will narrow over time. And that a completely custom-built website will become more of a rarity. Instead, it will be custom integrations and implementations - small pieces of development linking together UI, APIs and services.<p>It makes me believe that most of these firms will need to be able to offer a mixture of cloud integration and development to remain competitive.<p>No doubt there'll always be that space for hardcore 100% custom development. But I see that becoming niche.<p>What do you think?
I agree that the custom work will tend to move toward the back-end. I disagree that this is a narrowing of the available work. I think it expands because there are many more companies where operational improvements add more value than a digital brochure.