Years ago, as a junior developer, I used to think that there's totally no point in buying software projects. I thought that it's simply the best to build in in-house. At a certain point of my career, I understood that there are situations when it can make sense, money-wise. At that point, I had not worked in customer projects myself. Now I have. I can assure you that buying software projects is a risky business. So don't do it, if you can find a way around it. If you can build it in-house, just do it. The reason for this is the way the companies are run that do the projects. It'd horrid. It's a mix of worse sides of waterfall and scrum. Effectively they're simply cowboy coding. No planning, no documentation, no refactoring. Just hack it together. The budget is tight, and the project managers make sure that you spend 1/3rd less time than the budget would allow for. The quality is simply horrendous. You will end up w/a system that barely works, is glued together and is completely unmaintainable. Who the hell wants a project like that ? It seems that quite a few companies. They just don't know any better. They're happy when they're provided w/documentation that is copy/pasted from somewhere else. The documentation is almost always basically completely useless, and most oft there's lot of this paper. It doesn't solve any real problems, there's no engineering or planning done to create it. It's just put together at the pace of 30 pages a day.
So, you see - buying software through projects equates to buying complete crap. In addition, it's expensive. So what's the point?
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