Build vs buy.

We sell custom builds, so read this knowing the bias — and then notice the first advice is to buy. If a SaaS product does 90% of what you need, buy it. Otter for transcription, Rossum for invoices, RingCentral for phones. A funded product team maintaining a tool beats a contractor's one-off, every time the tool actually fits.

The build case begins where fit ends. Three signals, in rising order of strength: you're paying for four tools and a human to shuttle data between them; the tool almost fits but your highest-value case is the exception; or the workflow is your competitive edge — at which point renting it from the same vendor as your competitors is strategy malpractice.

A $99/month tool is $1,200 a year — buy it without a meeting. The real comparison starts when stacked subscriptions plus the salary-hours of gluing them together cross roughly $500 a month. A scoped custom build from us starts at $5,000, one-time, and the code is yours. The crossover is usually 12–18 months — sooner if the human glue is a manager's time.

Ongoing costs, honestly: custom systems need tending — model APIs change, sites you scrape change, your business changes. Budget from $500/month managed, or a few engineering hours a quarter in-house. Anyone quoting a build with zero maintenance is quoting a system that will quietly die.

Describe the workflow in one sentence. If the sentence names a category ("we need transcription"), buy. If it names your business ("when a quote request mentions a property over half an acre, pull the parcel data and route it to Mike with a draft") — no product will ever ship that. Build it, own it, and let it compound. That sentence test settles most build-vs-buy debates in one afternoon.