Building Custom Insurance Applications With

Unlimited Users
Delivering Insurance
Innovations Faster
with Scalable
Insurtech Platform
No Vendor Lock-in Unlimited Customizability

Contents
2
Delivering Insurance Innovations Faster with Openkoda
1.Why “Just Buying a System” Rarely Works in Insurance
2.Why Insurers and MGAs Get Pushed Toward Custom Software
3. The Harsh Reality of Custom Insurance Software Projects
a.Scope creep disguised as “just one more rule”
b.Exploding costs and moving deadlines
c.The hidden cost: long-term maintenance
4. The Other Side of the Coin: Customizability and Vendor Lock-In
5.The Middle Ground: Platform + Full Ownership with Openkoda
6. Core Features of Openkoda
7. Main Use Cases for Openkoda
8. Building a Custom Insurance Application with Openkoda (Example)
Arkadiusz Drysch
CEO at Openkoda
Michał Głomba
Openkoda Founder
Arkadiusz Krysik
Marketing Manager at Openkoda
Authors
This ebook is distributed under the Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0. License. The license allows for
redistribution, as long as the ebook is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to its
authors.
Connect Connect

Why “Just Buying a System” Rarely
Works in Insurance
If you talk to any CIO at an insurer or MGA, you’ll often hear the same story: “We tried to make
the core platform do it… and then we ended up building it ourselves anyway.”
Insurance is one of those domains where the real differentiation hides in the details: product
structure, underwriting rules, unusual distribution models, regulatory specifics in each market,
legacy processes that still matter for key accounts. A generic policy or claims system can take
you only so far before you start hitting the walls.
That’s why so many carriers and MGAs eventually go down the custom software route – not
because they want to become software companies, but because off-the-shelf tools stop
matching how they actually do business.
Let’s unpack why this happens, what makes custom projects so difficult, and how a new
generation of platforms – from big suites like Guidewire to open, code-centric platforms like
Openkoda – is trying to change the equation.
Why Insurers and MGAs Get Pushed
Toward Custom Software
3
On paper, the idea of buying a ready-made platform sounds perfect: you get “best practices,”
prebuilt modules, and vendor support. In reality, insurers and MGAs quickly discover a few
uncomfortable truths:
1.Products are more unique than vendors assume
Niche commercial lines, parametric covers, embedded products, Takaful models,
usage-based insurance, complex facultative reinsurance setups – these rarely map
cleanly onto standard product schemas.
Even “simple” lines like motor or travel become complex once you add your specific
rating logic, partner agreements, and regional regulatory quirks.
2.Distribution is messy and multi-channel
Brokers, agents, white-label partners, digital direct, aggregators, embedded journeys
inside third-party apps – each channel wants slightly different flows and data.
Trying to model all of that inside a closed, rigid system quickly becomes a game of
compromises and workarounds.

The Harsh Reality of Custom
Insurance Software Projects
1.Legacy never completely disappears
Old policy admin or claims systems don’t vanish overnight. You need to coexist,
integrate, and gradually migrate.
This requires very specific integration patterns, data models, and workflows that
standard software simply doesn’t anticipate.
2.Regulation moves faster than old architectures
New reporting requirements, ESG disclosures, data residency, evolving ID verification
rules – they all demand changes in your systems.
If every regulatory tweak becomes a six-month vendor project, your organization
starts to feel trapped.
At some point, the technology leadership realizes: “We need systems that adapt to us, not the
other way around.” That’s where custom development enters the picture.
4
Building your own policy, claims, or distribution platform is empowering… until the bills and
deadlines start to stack up.
There are a few repeating patterns:
Scope creep disguised as “just one more rule”
Insurance logic is full of exceptions.
A business user will ask for automatic approvals under a certain threshold but only for selected
brokers, or a discount that applies at renewal for a specific partner, or a routing rule that sends
high-value claims to a particular team in one region but not another. None of these requests
feels big enough to say “no” to; each sounds like “just one more rule.” The problem is that every
extra nuance touches multiple layers of the system: the underlying data model, the user
interface and its validations, the reporting layer, and often the integration logic with billing,
accounting, CRM, or external data providers.
What began as a controlled backlog for a minimum viable product gradually inflates into a
sprawling scope. Every workshop uncovers new branches in the logic tree.
In most industries this would be labeled classic scope creep; in insurance, it often feels
unavoidable because these details genuinely matter for risk selection, pricing, and profitability.

All of this complexity has a direct impact on cost and timelines. Custom insurance projects
bring together senior engineers, domain experts such as underwriters and actuaries, and long
integration chains spanning rating engines, document generation, e-signature tools, and back-
office systems. Initial estimates are typically built on optimistic assumptions: integrations will
be straightforward, non-functional requirements can be handled later, and certain “nice-to-
haves” will wait for a second phase. Reality tends to be less kind. Legacy integration turns out
to be more involved than expected. Performance, auditability, security, and multi-tenancy
emerge as hard, non-negotiable requirements that demand architectural work. Items
earmarked for a future phase quietly creep into the current one. Budgets stretch well beyond
the original plan, and go-live dates move steadily to the right. At some point, executives start
wondering whether they committed to a project or to a permanent transformation program
with no clear finish line.
5
Exploding costs and moving deadlines
The hidden cost: long-term maintenance
Even when a custom platform finally goes live and appears successful, a different kind of cost
begins to surface: ongoing maintenance.
From that moment on, the organization is responsible for keeping the technology stack
current, patching security vulnerabilities, scaling for higher transaction volumes or new
territories, and adapting to regulatory changes. New developers need to be onboarded into the
architecture and domain model, and their productivity depends heavily on how clean and
well-documented the system is. Without a strong architectural backbone, clear conventions,
and disciplined governance, the shiny new custom platform can degrade over time into a
fragile, tightly coupled system that only a handful of people truly understand. It becomes a
new kind of legacy—not because of the programming language used, but because the
accumulated complexity was never tamed.

The Other Side of the Coin:
Customizability and Vendor Lock-In
However, the story doesn’t end there. Over time, insurers discover that configurable platforms
come with their own constraints.
1.Configuration ≠ full flexibility
You can configure within what the platform designers imagined. When your product or
workflow needs to break those assumptions, you’re back to custom code, extensions,
and complex workarounds.
Deep customizations can make upgrades painful and expensive, which slowly erodes
the benefit of being on a standard platform.
2.Vendor lock-in shows up in several forms
Technology lock-in: You’re tied to the vendor’s stack, patterns, and release cycles.
Economic lock-in: Per-user or per-module licensing means that scaling usage or
adding new teams can significantly grow costs.
Roadmap lock-in: Your strategic priorities compete with other clients’ requests; critical
features may take years to appear, if ever.
3.Change still isn’t as fast as the business needs
Even with configuration tools, meaningful changes often require vendor-certified
partners, long testing cycles, and careful alignment with the platform’s upgrade path.
For MGAs and innovative insurers trying to launch new products quickly or experiment
with embedded models, this can feel almost as rigid as the old legacy systems.
6
So we end up with two imperfect extremes: on one side, fully custom builds that give insurers
maximum control over their products, workflows, and integrations, but are notoriously
expensive, slow to deliver, and inherently risky from a project and maintenance perspective;
on the other side, massive configurable platforms that provide strong, battle-tested
foundations and industry-standard capabilities, yet often limit real flexibility and gradually lock
organizations into a specific vendor’s technology stack, pricing model, and roadmap.
The natural question becomes: Is there a middle ground?

The Middle Ground: Platform + Full
Ownership with Openkoda
7
Core Features of Openkoda
This is where platforms like Openkoda come in — sitting deliberately between “build
everything from scratch” and “hand your core to a black-box vendor”.
Openkoda is an open-source insurance application development platform that gives you a
ready-made enterprise foundation (authentication, roles, multi-tenancy, admin panel, logging),
plus insurance-specific templates for things like claims, policy management, and embedded
insurance. Instead of starting from a blank page, your team begins with working modules and
focuses directly on your business logic.
It was created as a flexible alternative to proprietary solutions (like Salesforce) for insurance
companies, giving developers full ownership of the code with no vendor lock-in or per-user
licensing fees.
Openkoda includes a comprehensive suite of features out-of-the-box to accelerate
development of insurance and enterprise applications:
Enterprise Application Foundation: Common backend features are built in –
authentication and user management (with multiple auth methods like LDAP, Google,
SAML SSO, etc.), organization and multi-tenant support, and an admin panel for
logs/health monitoring. For example, you can invite and manage users across
organizations, handle password resets, and monitor system health without extra coding
Pre-Built Insurance Templates: Openkoda provides domain-specific templates (for claims
management, policy administration, embedded insurance, etc.) as a starting point. These
come with predefined data models and insurance logic, so you can begin with a working
claims engine or policy lifecycle module and then customize it to your needs rather than
starting from scratch

Visual Data Model & Form Builders: The platform includes a Development Kit UI that lets
you define data entities and forms through a graphical interface. You can easily add or
modify database tables and fields (with various types like text, number, dropdown,
reference, etc.), and changes apply instantly to both the database and the UI forms. This
means you can configure forms for policies or claims (e.g. add fields like Policy Type, Start
Date, Claim Description) in seconds, with built-in validation rules and relationships to
ensure data consistency
Customizable Dashboards and UI: Openkoda comes with a drag-and-drop dashboard
builder and pre-built widgets to create rich dashboards for different user roles. You can
design custom views (for example, an underwriter’s dashboard or an executive overview)
by arranging charts, tables, and widgets. The look and feel of the application is fully
customizable via standard HTML/CSS, allowing you to white-label or brand the interface
to match your company’s style
Business Logic & Automation: Beyond configuration, developers can extend Openkoda
with custom code. You can write server-side JavaScript or Java to implement custom
business rules and logic within the platform
Integration & API-First Design: Every Openkoda application automatically generates a
secure REST API for all standard operations on your data model. his makes it easy to
integrate with external systems or mobile apps.
Security and Access Control: Role-based access control (RBAC) is a core feature. You can
define roles and fine-grained privileges at various levels – global, per-organization, per-
module, down to specific tables or even fields.
Multitenancy & Scalability: The platform is built to support multiple organizations or
clients on one instance – ideal for scenarios like a SaaS solution or a third-party
administrator serving many insurers. You can run multiple organizations in a single
database or opt for isolated schemas/databases per tenant for higher data separation.
8

9
Main Use Cases for Openkoda
Openkoda is designed for building a variety of insurance and enterprise applications. Some of
the main use cases include:
Claims Management Systems: Developing custom claims handling software for insurers or
TPAs (Third-Party Administrators). Openkoda’s claims template provides a starting point
with a claims workflow engine, and you can add features like automated claim processing,
fraud detection AI, claim tracking dashboards, and payment tracking
Policy Administration Systems: Building internal systems to manage the entire insurance
policy lifecycle – from issuance through endorsements to renewal/cancellation. With
Openkoda’s policy management foundation, insurers can handle policy data, documents,
endorsements, and renewals in one place.
Embedded Insurance Solutions: Creating embedded insurance offerings, where insurance
products are sold via third-party digital channels. Openkoda supports building embeddable
insurance forms (for quotes, sign-ups, claims) that can be dropped into external websites
or apps with a simple snippet. For example, an insurtech might use Openkoda to quickly
set up a backend for offering travel insurance on an airline’s booking site.
Customer and Agent Portals: Implementing self-service portals for insurance customers,
agents, or brokers. Openkoda’s client portal builder and role management allow creation of
secure web portals where users can log in to view their policies, submit claims, download
documents, or get quotes.
Underwriting Dashboards: Developing internal tools for underwriters and analysts.
Openkoda can be used to build an underwriting workbench where underwriters review
submissions, assess risk, and collaborate. The platform’s dashboard and reporting features
(including AI-driven queries) enable creation of risk dashboards, portfolio analysis screens,
and workflow for quote approvals.
Launching New Insurance Products: Accelerating product development for new insurance
offerings or startups. Openkoda is often used by innovative insurers and insurtech startups
to go from idea to market quickly. Instead of coding an entire stack, teams can use
Openkoda’s modules to set up a minimum viable product – for instance, a new niche
insurance product (pet insurance, cyber insurance, etc.) – in a fraction of the time. This
includes configuring the product’s data model, building quote and policy screens, and
integrating with payment or third-party services as needed. The result is a functional
application ready to launch, which can then be continually extended with new features as
the business scales.
Legacy System Modernization: Replacing or augmenting legacy insurance systems
gradually. Enterprises with old COBOL-based or monolithic systems can use Openkoda to
modernize components step by step. For example, an insurer might first build a new
claims module in Openkoda and integrate it with the old policy system, then progressively
migrate other modules. Openkoda’s flexibility and integration capabilities help in
incremental legacy replacement, allowing co-existence and data integration between new
and old systems during a transition period.

10
Building a Custom Insurance Application with
Openkoda (Example)
To illustrate how one might use Openkoda in practice, consider an insurer building a customer
portal with policy management and claims submission features. Using traditional
development, this would be a greenfield project taking many months.
With Openkoda, a great deal of functionality is ready-made, and the development process
might involve the following steps:
Step 1: Start with a Prebuilt Template
Rather than beginning from a blank slate, the team selects one of Openkoda’s insurance
templates as a foundation. For a portal that includes policies and claims, you might initialize
the project with the Policy Management template (for policy lifecycle features) or a Claims
Management template – both come with built-in data models and workflows relevant to
insurance operations.
This provides a running application (with login, user roles, basic policy/claim entities, etc.)
within minutes, saving months of initial development time.

11
Step 2: Customize the Data Model and Forms
Using Openkoda’s visual Development Kit, developers (or even business analysts) configure
the specific fields and forms needed for the insurer’s products. For example, they create a
Policy form with fields like Policy Number, Coverage Type, Effective Date, Premium, etc., and a
Claim form with fields like Claim Description, Loss Date, Claim Amount, and file attachments
for supporting documents.
Field types are chosen from drop-downs (dates, numbers, references to other entities like
Customer or Agent), and validation rules are set (e.g. policy number must be unique, claim
amount cannot exceed a certain value). These forms define what data is captured and ensure
data quality (using required fields and consistent options) without writing low-level code.
Step 3: Customize the Data Model and Forms
Next, the team adds custom logic that reflects their business processes. Openkoda allows
writing server-side scripts (in JavaScript or Java) directly in the platform to implement business
rules.
For instance, you might create a rule that automatically approves claims under $1,000 or
routes certain claims to a special team if the Claim Type is “Fraud Alert”. Similarly, one can set
up event listeners and schedulers – for example, configuring an event that triggers an email
notification to a customer when their claim status changes, or a scheduled job that scans for
policies nearing renewal and sends reminders.
These automations streamline operations (no need for manual tracking) and can be configured
largely through Openkoda’s UI with minimal custom code.

12
Step 4: Set Up Roles and a Client Portal UI
The portal will be used by different personas (customers, insurance staff, admins), so proper
access control is configured. The team defines roles such as Customer, Claims Adjuster,
Underwriter, and Admin, each with permissions to view or edit specific data.
For example, a Customer role might only access their own policies and can submit new claims,
whereas an Adjuster can view all claims in their assigned region and update claim statuses.
Openkoda’s Client Portal Builder is then used to craft the front-end experience for customers
Step 5: Integrate with External Services
Most insurance apps need to connect with other systems. With Openkoda’s API-first approach,
the team can easily integrate external services. For instance, they might connect to a payment
gateway to handle online premium payments, or hook into a third-party underwriting service
for real-time risk scoring. Openkoda provides a REST API and webhooks out-of-the-box for
the core data, so the team might build a small frontend widget for payments that calls
Openkoda’s API to update policy payment status upon success.
Likewise, if the insurer uses a CRM or wants to push data to an analytics platform, they can
utilize Openkoda’s integration hooks or add custom Java code to sync data.
Step 6: Automate Communications and Document Generation
A key part of insurance processes is documentation and communication. With minimal effort,
the team sets up automated emails and in-app notifications for various events. For example,
when a customer submits a claim, the system can instantly email them a confirmation and
also notify an adjuster in-app about the new assignment.
Openkoda’s document generation feature is used to create templates for policy schedules and
claim acknowledgment letters, pulling in data fields to produce PDF documents on the fly.
Now, when a policy is issued or a claim is settled, the system can generate the paperwork (with
the company’s branding) automatically and even send it to the customer’s portal or email –
saving significant manual effort.

13
Step 7: Deploy, Test, and Scale
After configuring the portal, the application is deployed. Since Openkoda is open-source, the
insurer can choose to host it on their own cloud or on-premises infrastructure, or use
Openkoda’s managed cloud service.
The team thoroughly tests the application’s functionality and security (benefiting from the fact
that much of the underlying framework is already proven and stable). As usage grows, they can
scale the system by running multiple instances in a cluster and enabling multi-tenancy if the
portal is extended to partner agencies or additional lines of business.
Importantly, the insurer retains full control: they have the entire codebase, and can continue to
enhance the application – for example, adding a mobile app front-end that talks to the same
Openkoda backend, or introducing new modules like an Underwriting Dashboard next. With
the core platform in place, future enhancements are much faster to implement than if they
had coded a solution from the ground up.
By following steps like the above, an organization can build a fully custom insurance
application in a fraction of the time it would normally take. Openkoda’s mix of pre-built
features and extensibility provides a balance between speed and customization: the insurer
gets a tailored solution (not an off-the-shelf generic product) but avoids months of boilerplate
development work.
This empowers insurance teams to launch new digital capabilities quickly, respond to market
changes, and continuously improve their systems without the usual heavy IT backlog.

Faster Time-to-Market: By reusing Openkoda’s ready-made modules (authentication, user
management, forms, reporting, etc.), teams can reduce development effort by up to
around 60% and deliver new applications in weeks rather than months. This allows
insurers to respond quickly to new product ideas, regulatory changes, or partnership
opportunities.
Scalability and Performance: Openkoda is designed to handle large datasets and
concurrent users, supporting high-volume operations such as policy renewals, claims
processing, or reporting. Built-in multi-organization support and clustering enable a
smooth transition from a small pilot to a nationwide or multi-tenant SaaS solution without
re-architecting the system.
High Degree of Customization: With full access to the source code and data model,
Openkoda can be tailored to any insurance product, workflow, or integration scenario. Its
modular architecture and lack of vendor lock-in mean you can introduce new coverages,
rating engines, or bespoke processes on your own terms, without waiting for a vendor
roadmap.
Ease of Maintenance: A standardized, well-tested core built on mainstream technologies
(Java, Spring, PostgreSQL) reduces technical debt and makes it easier to find and onboard
developers. Built-in admin tools, audit logs, health monitoring and backup routines
simplify day-to-day operations.
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Key Benefits of Using Openkoda
Choosing Openkoda as the foundation for insurance software is not just a technology decision,
but a way to de-risk and accelerate digital initiatives. Instead of investing time and budget in
rebuilding standard components, teams start from a proven enterprise core and focus on the
parts of the system that truly differentiate their business.
Adopting Openkoda for insurance software development yields several key benefits:

15
Openkoda vs. Traditional
Greenfield Development
When insurers or insurtechs decide to build a new core system, portal, or claims platform, the
default mental model is often a “greenfield” project: start from a blank repository, define the
architecture, and build every layer step by step. It sounds empowering, and in theory it offers
unlimited freedom. In practice, however, teams quickly discover that a huge amount of time
and budget goes into recreating the same foundations over and over again — authentication,
user roles and permissions, admin panels, forms, logging, reporting, integrations, and so on.
Openkoda sits in a different place on this spectrum: instead of replacing custom development,
it accelerates it. You still build a solution tailored to your business, but you start from a battle-
tested enterprise core rather than an empty project.
The most visible difference appears in time to market.
A greenfield build of an enterprise-grade insurance system requires constructing every layer —
database schema, backend services, APIs, front-end UI, security and access control, plus
domain logic for policies, claims, billing or commissions. Even with modern frameworks, teams
spend months just getting to a stable foundation. Openkoda compresses this dramatically by
providing that foundation up front, along with reusable modules for user management,
role/permission matrices, multi-organization support, dashboards, reporting, and more. Instead
of reinventing these standard components, teams immediately focus on what’s unique: their
products, workflows, and integrations. In practice, this means launches measured in weeks
rather than months and development effort cut roughly in half. A new product or pilot portal
can be assembled from “insurance LEGO bricks” already available in the platform, then
extended where needed.
Time savings translate directly into cost differences.
With Openkoda, fewer developer hours are required to reach a working application, and a
smaller portion of the budget is consumed by generic plumbing. Because the platform is open
source, there are no per-user or per-module license fees; you can onboard unlimited internal
users, partners, or agents without your software bill exploding.
A common argument for greenfield development is flexibility: if you build everything yourself,
you can shape the system however you like. Openkoda’s design intentionally preserves that
level of freedom while eliminating the heavy lifting.
The platform is modular and extensible, so teams can toggle features, swap components, and
customize behavior in a controlled way.

16
Every layer — data model, business logic, UI, and integrations — can be adapted to the specifics
of a given product line or organizational structure. You have full access to the source code and
data model, which means you can implement unusual coverages, bespoke rating algorithms, or
non-standard workflows without waiting for a vendor roadmap. Because Openkoda is open
source, you’re not locked into a single supplier’s vision of what an insurance system should look
like; if you need a capability, you build or extend it on your timeline. In effect, Openkoda
occupies a sweet spot between raw frameworks (maximum effort, maximum freedom) and
closed platforms (limited freedom, lower initial effort), offering framework-level flexibility with
a substantial head start.
Maintainability is another area where the two approaches diverge over the long term.
Openkoda provides a standardized core maintained by both the Openkoda team and the
broader community. Critical concerns like authentication, logging, data access and security are
implemented consistently across modules, reducing the risk of subtle, hard-to-debug
differences between features. Built-in audit trails, backup mechanisms, and health monitoring
mean many operational tasks are covered from day one rather than bolted on later. The use of
mainstream technologies (Java, Spring, PostgreSQL) makes it easier to hire and onboard
developers, while the enforced structure for modules and events helps keep the codebase
coherent as it grows.
Taken together, these characteristics position Openkoda as a productivity accelerant rather
than a traditional product or framework. It blends the agility of custom development — you still
own and control every line of application logic — with the speed of a ready-made platform
where much of the heavy lifting has already been done.
Closing Thoughts
In the end, choosing the right technology foundation is less about chasing buzzwords and
more about securing long-term control over your insurance business. Openkoda gives insurers
and insurtechs a way to innovate quickly without sacrificing transparency, flexibility, or
ownership of their systems. It sits comfortably between rigid off-the-shelf products and risky
greenfield builds, offering a proven core that you can still shape around your own products,
processes, and strategy.
Openkoda hands you a robust set of wheels and a steering wheel: you still define the route and
drive the car, you just start the journey much faster — which, in competitive insurance markets,
can make all the difference.

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