Farm software the farm owns at Blue Sky Farms

What we found

Blue Sky Farms runs on software the farm owns. Before that, the farm paid for annually licensed software products and worked around what they could not do, waiting on vendors for changes. We replaced those products with software the farm owns, built to fit how the farm runs. The farm reports six figures a year saved on software costs so far. The exact dollar figure stays between us and the farm, so "six figures" is the public form.

This page is the record of that work. The figure and the quote below belong to Blue Sky Farms and are published with their permission, confirmed by their CFO. They describe one farm and one stack of products. Another business with another set of subscriptions will have its own arithmetic, and we say so before anyone carries these numbers into a budget meeting.

The rented stack

An annual license is two agreements in one. The vendor sends a bill every year for as long as you use the product, and the vendor decides what the product does and when it changes. A product that fits the work and costs little is cheap to keep. When the product stops fitting the work, the business pays the license and pays its own staff to cover the gap.

One person keeps a spreadsheet beside the product, because the product has no field for the thing the team needs to record. Each week another person exports a report and regroups it by hand, since the built-in grouping does not match how the business is organized. New hires learn the quirks from whoever trained them. That work takes time every week.

The farm files a change request, and the vendor decides where it sits in a queue with every other customer's request. Farm work runs on a calendar nobody can move. A place in that queue delays the farm's own calendar.

One product at a time

We replaced the products one at a time, and the farm kept running while we did it.

Each replacement was its own small project. The farm chose which product went first. We wrote down what that product did, what the team did around it, and what the replacement had to cover before the license could lapse. Then we built it, ran it beside the old product until it was doing the job, and moved to the next one.

The annual bill came down in steps, so the farm saw a return before the whole stack was finished. A build that turned out wrong touched one product, with the old license still running while we fixed it. Each build also taught us something about how the farm works, and the next build used it.

The work continues. Blue Sky Farms is a long-term relationship for us, and the replacement work is the first focus.

The software the farm owns

We wrote down each step of the farm's work, who does it, how often it happens, and what people do when the software gets in the way. That write-up is what we built from.

Staff do the missing work by hand, and the person doing it can usually describe the missing feature in one sentence. Those descriptions became the first list of what the replacement had to do.

Owning the software means the farm holds the code and the data and decides what happens next. When somebody at the farm asks for a change, we schedule it with a date. The farm can also decide a change is not worth paying for. That decision now belongs to the farm.

What changed

Six figures a year saved on software costs so far, and the farm changes its tools when it needs to.

Here is how Josh Mcdonald, CFO of Blue Sky Farms, describes it:

"We were paying for a stack of software subscriptions every year and still working around what they couldn't do. Plainpath replaced them one at a time with tools we own and that fit how the farm actually runs. We're saving six figures a year, and we stopped waiting on vendors to fix things."

The saving is annual. It repeats for every year the farm runs software it owns, and it shows up on a bank statement, which makes it easy to check.

Owning software carries its own costs, and we say them plainly. The farm pays to run the software and pays for the work of fixing what breaks and building what it asks for next. Anyone reading the saving should read that line with it.

The other change is the schedule. When the farm asks for a change, the farm and Plainpath agree a date and we build to that date. The next product on the replacement list is the farm's choice as well.

Limits

Replacing a licensed product with software you own is worth the effort when three things are true.

• The annual bill is large enough that the arithmetic works. A small subscription will not pay for a build.
• The team can describe its own work in steps, because that description is what we build from.
• Someone inside owns the system after we leave, asks for changes, and gets them. When nobody owns it, people go back to their old steps and nobody asks for the changes that would keep the software fitting. We wrote about that in why most AI pilots fail.

A build can also be much smaller than a stack of farm software. At Genesco Sports Enterprises, a month-end reconciliation that took the CFO about 4 days by hand now runs in about 60 seconds, and the record of that build is on this site. At McHur Care, the replacement was one system, a custom EHR.

To see where your own stack stands, list every product you pay for each year, what it does, and the steps your team performs because the product will not do them. Our walk-through for that is how to run your first AI audit in an afternoon. If you want a person to check that list and write a build plan against it, that is Discovery.

Frequently asked questions

What did Plainpath build for Blue Sky Farms?

Software the farm owns, replacing the annually licensed products it used before, built to fit how the farm runs. We replaced the products one at a time, and the replacement work continues.

How much did Blue Sky Farms save?

Six figures a year saved on software costs so far. The exact dollar figure stays between us and the farm, so "six figures" is the public form.

Is owning your software the right move for every business?

No. The annual bill has to be large enough that the arithmetic works, the team has to describe its own work in steps, and someone inside has to own the system after the build. When one of those is missing, a smaller build on a single process is the better first step.

Who owns the software Plainpath builds?

The client does. Blue Sky Farms holds the code and the data and decides what gets changed next.

How do I tell which of my subscriptions is worth replacing?

List every product you pay for each year, what it does, and the steps your team performs because the product will not do them. The products with a large annual bill and a long list of manual steps are the first candidates. Discovery is where a person checks that list and writes a build plan against it.

The plain take

The money here is money the farm keeps every year, and it held up because the license bill was large and the team could describe its own work in steps. Owning the software brings costs of its own, for hosting and for every change the farm asks for, and we name those so the number is read honestly. If you want a person to check your own list of annual products and write a build plan against it, that is Discovery.