Buy it or build it

The discussion usually goes wrong in its first sentence: “should we buy or build?”. Framed that way, it gets answered with costs — and cost is the least important variable in play.

The useful question is a different one: is this process part of what makes us worth choosing, or is it plumbing that everyone needs?

What is plumbing gets bought

Invoicing. Email. Digital signatures. Accounting. Time tracking. These are processes where no competitive advantage is possible: nobody ever picked a supplier because their payroll system was more elegant.

Building those from scratch burns money twice: once on development, and then every month maintaining something the market sold you ready-made, tested and kept up to date by somebody else.

The rule is simple: if the process is the same at your company as at your competitor’s, buy it.

What sets you apart gets built

At the other end sits the process that explains why people choose you. The particular way you put together a proposal, the logic behind how you prioritise, the judgement you apply where others apply a lookup table.

Putting that inside an off-the-shelf tool carries a cost that never shows up in the price comparison: it forces you to operate the way the product operates. And since the product is designed for the market average, you end up resembling the market average. You saved on licences and paid with your edge.

Here, building is not a luxury: it is the only option that preserves what you had.

The middle, which is where almost everything sits

Few decisions land cleanly at either end. Most cases are mixed, and there the answer is rarely “all bought” or “all custom”, but buy the base and build the part that sets you apart on top of it.

A standard ERP for the administrative side, with your own module for the logic that is yours. An off-the-shelf platform for the bulk, with a custom integration where your operation looks like nobody else’s.

What to avoid is the badly executed middle: customising someone else’s product until it almost fits. That is the worst of both worlds — you pay licences, you pay development, you are tied to someone else’s roadmap, and every product update can break what you customised.

If the tool has to be bent out of shape to be useful, it was not the tool.

The questions to ask before deciding

Before comparing prices:

Is this process the same at my competitors? If yes, buy. If no, look at how much of that difference is real judgement and how much is habit — sometimes what looks like an edge is just “we have always done it this way”, and there, adopting the product’s standard is the better move.

What happens if the tool changes owner, price or direction? If the process is critical and you do not control the tool, that risk is part of the cost.

How much does the product have to be bent to be useful? If the answer is “quite a lot”, you are no longer buying off the shelf: you are building custom, with less control and at a higher price.

And a warning

If a provider answers this question without having looked at your operation, they are not advising you: they are selling you what they already have.

The right answer depends on what your edge is, and that cannot be known from the outside.