Custom application development has maintenance costs associated with it. You can ignore those but it's at your own peril, nothing is stopping your from having a

Custom application development has maintenance costs associated with it. You can ignore those but it's at your own peril, nothing is stopping your from having an unsecured public web server running on your systems, it's just a bad idea. Just like nothing prevents you from not updating Windows and having your laptop become part of a bot-net. If you can't afford that cost it would be ill advised to use custom software application (or take a different approach to it that doesn't involve exposing a web server to the internet). Either way comparing Photoshop/Word updates to updating a custom application running on a *nix server exposed to the world is just absurd. And yes you're right, custom application development should probably be avoided wherever possible. Especially if you don't expect the ROI to exceed ongoing expenses.