The honest answer to "should we build or buy this?" is usually buy. Custom software is expensive to build and, more importantly, expensive to own. It earns its place only in specific situations — and knowing which is the difference between leverage and a money pit.
Buy when the problem is generic
Payroll, email, CRM, auth, payments, analytics — thousands of companies have the exact same need, and a mature vendor has already solved the edge cases you have not hit yet. Rebuilding that is not engineering, it is re-paying for R&D someone already did. Buy it, integrate it, move on.
Build when the software is the differentiator
The rule of thumb: build the thing your customers actually pay you for, buy everything around it. If a workflow is your competitive edge — the pricing engine, the matching algorithm, the internal tool that makes your ops 3× faster — an off-the-shelf product will always force you into someone else’s model. That is exactly where custom pays off.
The hidden costs on both sides
- Buying is not free: per-seat pricing compounds, integrations rot, and you inherit the vendor’s roadmap and limits.
- Building is not a one-time cost: every line you write is a line you maintain, secure and migrate for years.
- The worst outcome is "custom" software that just re-implements a SaaS you could have bought — all of the cost, none of the edge.
A simple test
Ask: if this worked perfectly, would a customer notice or care? If yes, it is probably worth building. If it is plumbing they will never see, buy the most boring, reliable option and spend your engineering budget where it moves the needle.
How we think about it with clients
Before we write any code we map which parts of your stack are commodity and which are genuinely yours. We push you to buy the commodity — even when it means a smaller project for us — and we build hard on the 20% that is actually your moat. If that is the conversation you need, get in touch.