When to buy and when to build
Building in-house gives you absolute control, but the hidden cost of maintenance usually exceeds any commercial license.
Key ideas
- If it's your competitive advantage, build it.
- If it's operational support, buy it.
- The real cost is maintenance.
Focus on the differentiator
No customer will pay you more because your engineering team built its own in-house CRM. Dedicate your technical talent exclusively to what makes your company unique against the competition.
If the software you need is "support" software (human resources, invoicing, ticket handling), the default decision should always be to buy.
The zero-cost illusion
A common argument is that developing in-house saves the annual licensing cost. This analysis usually ignores the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) entirely.
Building costs months of developer salaries. But the real cost comes later: security updates, servers, technical debt and the fact that this team won't be building product for customers.
When building does make sense
You should only build when the market offers nothing that supports your core business model, or when the way you run that process is precisely why your customers choose you.
In that scenario, internal software becomes a company asset, not a maintenance expense.