MSGPLS series · Part 1

Custom Software vs SaaS: Why We Built MSGPLS

We kept building the same Viber tool for different clients. So we built it once, for everyone.

The short answer

Custom software fits one company’s process exactly. SaaS is faster to start and cheaper, because many companies share it. You don’t always have to choose. MSGPLS, the Viber business messaging platform built by Generic Soft, a software development company in Sofia, started as the custom tool we kept rebuilding for clients. Now it’s one product, and we still build custom work on top of it.

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Most of our work starts with a phone call and a problem that belongs to one company.

A distributor wants its warehouse system to talk to its accounting software. A lab wants a climate chamber that runs itself. We build it, we hand it over, and the next project is something completely different.

Then one request started coming back. Different clients, different industries, almost the same words.

“Can we send our customers messages on Viber?”

This is the story of how that question settled the custom software vs SaaS debate for us, at least for one problem that kept coming back.

The message people actually open

Ask someone in Bulgaria where they read messages from their family, and the answer usually isn’t email. It’s Viber.

Email still works for receipts and newsletters. But a promotional email lands in a tab nobody checks, and an SMS is a line of plain text that looks a lot like this week’s scam text. A Viber message from a business shows up in the same app as messages from your mum, with the company’s name on it, a picture and a button you can tap.

Businesses got that straight away. What they struggled with was everything around it.

Where our clients kept getting stuck

Sending one Viber message is easy. Sending the right one to 20,000 people at 9 o’clock on a Thursday, and knowing afterwards how many of them saw it, is not.

Every client ran into the same walls:

• Viber has rules. Order updates and one-time codes have to be approved by Viber before they go out, and a message that breaks a rule simply bounces.
• Contact lists are messy. Spreadsheets full of duplicates, numbers without a country code, and people who asked not to be contacted again.
• Nobody knew what happened after “send”. Did it arrive? Did anyone read it? Did they reply, and who’s answering?
• The marketing team wanted to do all of this themselves, without opening a ticket with IT every time.

We solved these for one client, then for the next, a little differently each time. At some point it got hard to ignore. We were writing the same software over and over.

Building it once: how we turned custom software into SaaS

Turning custom software into SaaS means keeping what every client needs, dropping one client’s habits, and adding what a shared platform needs.

Custom software has one nice luxury: it only has to make one company happy. You know their people, their data and their quirks. If something looks odd, you call them.

A product doesn’t get that luxury. It has to make sense to a pharmacy chain and a courier company on the same Monday morning, without us standing behind anyone’s chair.

So the switch came with some hard choices.

What we kept

The parts every client needed, every single time: message templates, contact lists, campaigns, delivery reports and a way to answer replies. We’d built versions of these often enough to know which details matter. People don’t just want “send now”. They want “send next Tuesday at 10” and “send every Monday morning”.

What we threw away

The screens and shortcuts that were built around one client’s habits. If a feature only made sense for one company, it didn’t make it into the product. (It didn’t vanish, either. More on that below.)

What we added

The things you only need once many businesses share one platform. An approval step, so nothing goes out by accident. Pricing that works for a small shop and for a large sender. And protection for the personal data sitting in your contact lists.

What it looks like from your side

You log in to a web dashboard. There’s nothing to install.

Two things are set up once, before your first campaign:

• Your contacts. Bring your customer list, as a spreadsheet if that’s what you’ve got. The platform spots duplicates and broken numbers and asks you what to do with them, instead of failing quietly later.
• Your message template. Plain text, a picture with a button, a short video or a PDF. If Viber needs to approve it first, the platform sends it off for review and shows you where it stands. Viber’s review usually takes about 10 to 15 minutes, and it can take up to 24 hours.

Then every campaign takes four steps:

1. Details and template. Name the campaign and pick the message. A phone preview shows you exactly what your customer will see, and you can drop in each person’s name or any other detail from your list.
2. Audience. Everyone, a group tagged “vip” or “plovdiv-store”, or a hand-picked list. Anyone who has unsubscribed is left out automatically, so you don’t have to remember who they were.
3. Schedule. Send right now, or at a set time.
4. Review. Check the name, message, audience and timing on one screen, then create the campaign.

Once it’s out, you watch the numbers come in: delivered, seen, replied. And when a customer writes back, the reply lands in an inbox where your team can answer it like any other chat.

For the bigger jobs, like login codes or order updates sent straight from your own systems, there’s an API your developers can connect to.

Want to see it with your own contact list? Book a demo

If you want the details of Viber’s message types and rules, the MSGPLS team explains them in Viber business messages: what they are and how they work (in Bulgarian).

You shouldn’t need a developer to send a Viber campaign. And when you do need one, ours is a phone call away.

Custom software vs SaaS: the part a typical SaaS tool can’t offer

This is where being a custom software development company pays off for you.

Most messaging tools are what they are. If your process doesn’t fit the tool, you change your process.

With us, the platform is the starting point. Maybe your messages need to be triggered by an old ERP that nobody else connects to. Maybe your finance team wants a report in a very particular shape. The people who built the platform can build that for you. Same team, same code, no middleman.

Remember the one-off features we threw out of the product? That’s where they went. On top of it, for the client who actually needs them.

Build vs buy software: do you still have to choose?

The classic build vs buy software question assumes two options: build your own and own every line, or buy a subscription and live with its limits. Generic Soft is a software development company from Sofia that builds custom software, AI solutions and dedicated engineering teams, and MSGPLS gave us a third option to offer.

If your problem is truly unique, build it. If it’s standard, buy it. If it’s standard with a twist, like most Viber messaging we see, start with the product and pay only for the twist. Our SaaS development team uses the same thinking when a client wants to turn their own internal tool into a product.

What comes next in the MSGPLS series

This is the first in a series of articles about MSGPLS. Next, we’ll look at why Viber messages get read when email doesn’t, how automated messages can take routine work off your team, and how to connect the platform to the systems you already use.

We’re also working on automated flows, like a birthday message or an appointment reminder that goes out on its own. We’ll write about those when they’re ready, not before.

Let’s talk

The quickest way to find out if this fits your business is to see it. We’ll walk you through the platform with your own case in mind, whether that’s a weekly promotion, delivery notices or verification codes.

We used to build that Viber tool again for every client who asked. Now we can just show it to you. Read more about the platform at msgpls.com.

Last updated: 10 November 2026