Every project brief eventually hits the build vs. buy question. The answers are usually either “buy everything” (from the CFO) or “build everything” (from the engineers).
Both are wrong. The actual question is simpler.
Where does your competitive advantage live?
If it lives in the software — in how it works, how it feels, what it does that nobody else’s product does — you build. If it doesn’t, you buy, integrate, and move on.
Your payroll system is probably not your competitive advantage. Your proprietary pricing engine might be. Your CRM is almost certainly off-the-shelf territory. The algorithm that routes your inventory isn’t.
This sounds obvious until you’re in a room with an enthusiastic engineering team and a vendor with a good demo. Then it gets harder.
When buying makes sense
Email. Authentication. Analytics dashboards. Document signing. Payments. These are solved problems. No customer ever chose you because your password reset email was well-engineered.
Buy the solved problems. Configure them properly. Then spend your engineering time on the things that actually matter to your business.
When building makes sense
When the software is the product. When the workflow is genuinely unusual and off-the-shelf tools don’t fit without expensive, compounding customization. When the data can’t leave your infrastructure. When you’ve actually tried the available options and they don’t work.
That last one matters: “we haven’t tried it yet” is not a reason to build.
The trap in the middle
The dangerous zone is a SaaS tool that almost fits. You buy it, spend months configuring it, build workarounds for the gaps, and end up with something that’s harder to maintain than custom code and still doesn’t do what you need.
This is where “buy” decisions become more expensive than builds — not because the tool is bad, but because it was the wrong fit for the problem.
A useful heuristic
Think about what you need the software to do in three years, not today. If the off-the-shelf tool can grow with you, buy it. If the gaps will compound, build now and build it right.
You’ll pay for the decision either way. The question is when — and whether the pain comes as a monthly invoice or a six-month replatform. If you’re at that decision point and want a second opinion, this is the kind of work we do.