Build vs. buy
"Should we build this or buy it?" is one of the most expensive questions a company answers, and it's usually answered badly — by whoever feels strongest in the room that day. Here's the framework I use to make it a deliberate decision.
Start with the real question
The question is never "can we build it?" — a good team can build almost anything. The question is "is building it the best use of the most scarce thing we have?" For most companies that scarce thing is engineering time and focus, not money.
The five tests
1. Is it core to your differentiation? Build the thing customers choose you for. Buy the thing they simply expect to work. Your unique value is worth owning; commodity capability rarely is.
2. What's the true cost of building? Not just the first version — the maintenance, the on-call, the edge cases, and the opportunity cost of everything your team didn't build instead. Building is a permanent liability, not a one-time cost.
3. How good is the buy option, really? A mature vendor has solved problems you haven't hit yet. But evaluate honestly: integration cost, lock-in, pricing as you scale, and what happens if they change direction or disappear.
4. How fast do you need it? Buying usually wins on speed. If time-to-market is the constraint, that often settles it — at least for the first version.
5. Can you change your mind later? The best decisions preserve optionality. Buy now to move fast, with an architecture that lets you replace the vendor later if it becomes core. The reverse — un-building something you over-invested in — is much harder.
The trap to avoid
The most expensive mistake I see is building commodity infrastructure because it's satisfying engineering work, while the actual differentiator gets starved of attention. Engineers love to build. Part of a CTO's job is to protect the team's focus from that instinct.
A simple default
When it's genuinely a coin toss: buy to learn, build to own. Buy your way to understanding the problem and proving demand, and only build once you know exactly what you need and it's clearly core. You'll build the right thing instead of your first guess at it.
This is one of the calls I help leadership teams make on every engagement. If there's a big build-vs-buy decision in front of you, let's talk.