You might have heard the story about the garage mechanic’s sign:
“Folks want their work done, cheap, good and quick. They can’t have all three. If you want your work done quick and cheap, don’t expect it to be good. If you want your work done quick and good, it ain’t gonna be cheap. If you want it done good and cheap, then don’t expect it to be quick.”
Those trade-offs apply in a lot of work, perhaps including the work you do for your clients. They certainly apply with a lot of software development work, and we constantly have to remember that “good” has to take priority over “quick” and “cheap”.
There is a similar notion, when it comes to the quality of software. We call it the “Software Feature Triangle”. This is what that triangle looks like:

The Feature Triangle
When you are looking for software (especially, custom software, or software for a vertical market like the legal market), you have to make some choices, and you might have to compromise your expectations. Most software developers will strive for a reasonable price (so they can sell more software), a simple interface (to reduce their support commitments to users), and a significant amount of power (to give their users a tool that will increase productivity). Just as the garage mechanic can’t settle for “good, cheap and quick”, software developers have to find an acceptable point between the three quality criteria. As power and simplicity increase, there will be more development time required, and therefore a higher price. The “sweet spot” is somewhere in the interior of the triangle, but for LawStream development, it will be closer to the “power and simplicity side”, rather than close to the “price corner”.