> it needs a real engineer (and often more money than they can spend) to create the right solution.

Then it's the wrong solution. Period.

There are plenty of annoyances with spreadsheets, but part of what makes them so robust and powerful is that they don't take a ton of specialized knowledge, and they remain incredibly flexible.

An expensive, complicated, static, "right" solution for a small business is folly (honestly - this stays true up to medium/large business). It's a ton of time and energy focused on the absolute wrong thing. When a spreadsheet can reach the same result in a fraction of the time.

Especially given the result may not actually be that important, and they pivot to something else entirely in the very near future.

I've worked at several startups. I'd caution even software startups from assuming that custom solutions are the right approach. They usually aren't. They're a waste of time and effort that ends up saddling you with a brittle, expensive solution designed to solve problems from last year.

You are missing something: how much is spent because the spreadsheet isn't the right solution - nobody measures this (or even knows how). How much are you risking because spreadsheets are not robust - when will a mistake catch up, and what will be the cost? There is a reason accountants use double entry bookkeeping, and spreadsheets don't have that.

Nobody has the money to spend doing things right unless they have been burned. That doesn't mean the money shouldn't be spent first.

Spreadsheets are powerful I will grant. However they are not robust. A robust system works very different and includes features (like tests) that your spreadsheet doesn't have (I don't if it could have them, but it is safe to guess they don't)