I am new to both Claude and N8N. I am looking to build my own ai software. What are your current uses and which is better for what usage?

Looking for honest feedback from people who’ve built real systems in n8n. At what point do you decide a business is specific enough to justify a custom build, and at what point do you stop reinventing the wheel and use off-the-shelf software with automation around the edges? Three months ago, this started as one small task for my dad’s business: a daily email showing which supplier and customer payments were due that week, as my first n8n automation real project... He runs a small Italian tour operator for marathon and half-marathon trips, with around 10 to 12 events a year and 900+ quote requests. Three months later, it had turned into a full back-office system on self-hosted n8n + Airtable, and it’s now handling real bookings. Right now, it’s 27 workflows covering quote intake, pricing, quote emails, booking forms, PDF contracts, payment follow-up, booking modifications, error handling, and recovery flows. I didn’t seriously evaluate off-the-shelf booking software before building, mainly for three reasons: 1) The pricing and booking rules felt weird enough that I assumed SaaS might only work through configuration and paid customization, or a pile of workarounds 2) Dad is absolutely non-technical, so I wanted the tool to match how he actually works day to day 3) Honestly, I wanted to know if I could build it That third reason is the one that makes me question the first two. The system fits him well and has cleaned up several messy manual processes. Now everything is in one Airtable interface, arranged in a way that makes sense to him. Does this sound like a fair custom n8n use case, or the kind of problem where the smarter move would have been using an existing quote-to-booking products and only automating around it? I’m especially interested in answers from people who’ve lived through the maintenance side of similar builds, because “I knew I could build it” is exactly the reason I don’t fully trust my own judgment here. I’m still new enough to this stuff that I can’t fully tell where genuine fit ends and build excitement starts.