Build or Buy

SaaS or develop yourself?

The classic question that you have heard so many times, in so many shapes. Now, slightly adjusted for our purpose I will discuss some thoughts around the topic.

If you want to build the most expensive tool ever built — build it yourself. It’s the most costly way of getting it done.

Not only because you are most likely re-inventing the wheel — that has no real cost except “opportunity cost” (the cost of not doing the second best option — classic finance term) — but because of the fact that you do need to develop, then maintain, and o top of that you need to build ALL functionality yourself. Nothing is “out-of-the-box”.

However – if the system doesn’t exist — what to do? And further, today no one just starts coding from scratch, there are frameworks, open source libraries, vendor folder management, tons of packages, and platforms as a service.

Another very expensive way of building your “tool” is to buy something third party, like your favourite Sales CMS, and then “customise it”. Many are the companies that lives off from these customisations, that are in themselves hidden mega projects sometimes designed to make the most profit for these “Service Partners”.

“Out-of-the-box” or “Off-the-shelf” rarely works the way you wanted it work. However, no one in their right mind would build their own accounting system nowadays, right? There are tons of them out there and they are semi automated even.

Some even claim AI (when this book was written, there were still no awakening self-awareness of any artificial intelligence known).

The point I’m trying to make is that most likely you can get a decent accounting system that does what is should for a small subscription fee. There's no point in developing it yourself.

Unless you have a new awesome idea on how to make the next much better accounting system out there of course.

I’m not even going to mention buying classical software licenses and hosting something on premise. Just don’t do it.

Read more in "The CTO Playbook" available on Amazon/Kindle.