Build, buy, or kill: how to make the call without a vendor in the room
By Stephan Aull · · 5 min read
The hardest build-vs-buy decisions are rarely hard for technical reasons. They are hard because of who you ask. When the advice comes from a firm that bills more when you build, “you should build this” is not a finding — it is a sales motion wearing a finding’s clothes. The first move in any honest build-vs-buy call is to notice the incentive of whoever is answering it.
Once the conflict is named, the method is unglamorous. Be specific about what is actually differentiating versus what is table stakes you are paying to re-create. Price the real cost of owning the thing for its whole life, not just shipping v1 — maintenance, security, the team you will need on it in three years. Ask what “buy” actually locks you into, and what it would cost to leave. And be honest about the option nobody pitches: kill it. The feature that quietly eats your timeline is often one no customer asked for and no one wants to be the person to cut.
You do not need a vendor in the room to run this. You need someone with nothing to sell on the other side of the answer — which, structurally, a build shop can never be.