How We Decide When to Build vs Buy
Custom software is not always the answer. Here is the framework we use with clients to figure out which approach actually makes sense.
We are a software development studio, so you might expect us to always argue for building custom. We do not. Plenty of problems are better solved by reaching for an existing tool, and recommending otherwise would be doing our clients a disservice.
The question we always start with is: what is actually differentiated here?
If It Is Not Differentiated, Do Not Build It
Authentication is not a competitive advantage. Neither is email delivery, payment processing, or file storage. These are commodities, and there are excellent SaaS products that handle them at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining them yourself.
Where custom software makes sense is where the thing you are building is the business, or where existing tools simply cannot do what you need without so much configuration they effectively become a worse version of something custom.
A useful test: if your competitor could buy the same tool tomorrow and replicate the feature entirely, it probably does not need to be custom.
The Total Cost of Ownership Problem
Teams often compare the cost of buying a SaaS product against the cost of building the first version. That is the wrong comparison. The right comparison is the ongoing cost of maintaining and evolving that custom software over years, with a team that will inevitably change.
SaaS tools handle their own uptime, security patches, compliance updates, and feature development. Custom software inherits all of those responsibilities. Before committing to building something, it is worth being honest about whether your organisation has the capacity to own it long term.
When Custom Is the Right Call
There are clear cases where building is the better choice. When the data model is genuinely unique to your business. When you need deep integration between systems that SaaS tools treat as separate concerns. When you are building a product that will be used by other people as a core part of their workflow.
Sometimes the argument is simpler: the SaaS options are mediocre, expensive for the scale you need, or have a pricing model that becomes punishing as you grow. In those cases, a well-scoped custom solution can pay for itself relatively quickly.
The Hybrid Approach Nobody Talks About
The most pragmatic answer is often neither "build everything" nor "buy everything". It is starting with SaaS to validate the need, then replacing the components that have become real bottlenecks with custom solutions once you understand the problem properly.
Building too early is just expensive guessing. The best time to invest in custom infrastructure is when you know exactly what you need it to do.
Working through a build vs buy decision for your product? Get in touch — it is exactly the kind of problem we enjoy thinking through with clients.