When to Build vs Buy: The Software Decision Most Businesses Get Wrong

Every business eventually hits the same wall. You've got a problem. Something's eating up time. Maybe you're copying data from one place to another, sending the same type of email over and over, or manually updating clients every time something changes on their account.

So you do what everyone does: you Google it. And suddenly you've got fifteen tabs open, each promising to solve your exact problem for "just" $29/month per user.

Here's the thing nobody tells you: for many of these problems, you're better off building something yourself.

Not always. But way more often than most people think.

The Hidden Cost of Yet Another App

Let's talk about what really happens when you subscribe to a new SaaS tool.

Day one feels great. The onboarding is slick. The demo showed exactly what you needed. You're solving the problem!

Fast forward six months. Now you've got:

• Another login to remember (or another entry in your password manager)
• Another dashboard to check
• Another set of user permissions to manage when someone joins or leaves the team
• Another monthly charge that auto-renews whether you use it or not
• Another integration that might break when any of your other tools update
• Another company that might get acquired, pivot, or jack up prices

When Off-the-Shelf Makes Sense

Before I go further, let me be clear: there are absolutely situations where buying software is the right call.

Complex, specialized domains. Accounting software? Buy it. CRM with years of sales methodology baked in? Buy it. Email delivery infrastructure? Definitely buy it. These tools represent decades of domain expertise and edge cases you don't want to discover on your own.

Commoditized needs. Calendar scheduling, video conferencing, document signing. These problems are solved. The solutions are cheap. Building your own would be absurd.

When your team will actually use the features. If you're genuinely going to leverage 70%+ of what a tool offers, and it integrates well with your stack, and the pricing works at scale... that's a buy.

The question isn't "should we ever buy software?" Obviously yes. The question is: are you reaching for a subscription when a simple custom solution would serve you better?

The Signs You Should Build Instead

Here's where I see businesses make the wrong call over and over again.

You're Solving One Specific Problem

You send a confirmation email every time a client's order ships. That's it. That's the whole thing.

You don't need a "customer communication platform" for $200/month. You need a script that triggers when the order status changes in your system and sends an email using your existing email service.

Time to build: a few hours. Ongoing cost: basically zero. Maintenance: almost none, because it does one thing and that thing rarely changes.

You're Already Doing It Manually (And It's Predictable)

Think about the repetitive tasks in your business. The ones where someone on your team could write down exact step-by-step instructions. Things like:

• "When a new lead comes in, add them to this spreadsheet and send them the welcome packet"
• "Every Friday, pull the sales numbers from the dashboard and paste them into the weekly report"
• "When a project is marked complete, email the client with the final deliverables"

The Integration Would Be Cleaner

Here's one that surprises people: custom-built solutions often integrate better than off-the-shelf products.

Why? Because you build them to work with YOUR systems. Not some generic API that sort of maps to how you do things if you squint.

You've got a database with your customer info. You've got an email system. You've got your order management tool. A custom solution can read directly from your database, use your existing email setup, and hook into your order system exactly how you need it to.

Meanwhile, the SaaS alternative needs you to set up Zapier workflows, configure webhooks, map fields that don't quite match, and pray nothing breaks when any of these systems updates.

Real Examples You Might Recognize

Let me paint some pictures. See if any of these sound familiar.

The Invoice Status Update Problem

The situation: Every time an invoice gets paid, someone needs to update the project status in your PM tool and notify the account manager.

The "buy" approach: Subscribe to an integration platform. Configure the triggers. Map the fields. Set up the notification rules. Pay $50/month. Troubleshoot when it randomly stops working.

The "build" approach: A small script that watches for payment confirmations (your payment processor already sends webhooks), updates a field in your PM tool (they have an API), and sends a Slack message (or email) to the account manager.

One afternoon of work. Free forever. Does exactly what you need, nothing more.

The Client Onboarding Checklist

The situation: New clients need a welcome email, access credentials to your client portal, a kickoff call scheduled, and their info added to your CRM.

The "buy" approach: Onboarding automation software! $150/month. Spend two weeks configuring it. Realize it doesn't integrate with your specific portal. Build workarounds.

The "build" approach: A simple form that triggers when a new client is added. It sends the welcome email from a template, creates their portal account, adds a calendar link for self-scheduling, and pushes their details to your CRM. All using the tools you already have.

The Weekly Report Nightmare

The situation: Every Monday, someone spends two hours pulling numbers from three different dashboards, formatting them, and emailing the summary to leadership.

The "buy" approach: Business intelligence platform! $300/month minimum. Data warehouse setup. Dashboard training. Now you need someone who knows SQL. Somehow this became a whole project.

The "build" approach: A scheduled script that hits the APIs of your existing tools, formats the numbers, and sends the email automatically at 8am Monday. Total setup: one day. The person who used to do this manually now does something more valuable with those two hours.

The "But We're Not Technical" Objection

I hear this constantly: "That sounds great, but we don't have developers."

Fair point. But consider:

You might have more technical ability than you think. Tools like Airtable, Retool, or even Google Apps Script let people with basic spreadsheet skills build surprisingly capable automations. It's not "programming" in the scary sense.

The one-time cost of building beats the ongoing cost of subscribing. Hiring a developer for 10 hours at $150/hour is $1,500. That "simple" SaaS tool at $99/month costs $1,188/year. In about 15 months, you've broken even. After that, you're saving money every month while they're still paying.

Custom solutions are often simpler to maintain. They do one thing. When something breaks (rare), it's obvious what went wrong. No debugging mysterious SaaS platform issues or waiting for their support team to get back to you.

You can always hire someone to build it. And now you own it. No subscription. No price increases. No "we're pivoting our product direction" emails. It's yours.

How to Make the Decision

Here's a simple framework:

Buy when:

• The problem is complex and well-established (accounting, CRM, email marketing)
• You'll genuinely use most of the features
• Integration is straightforward
• The tool has a strong track record and stable company behind it
• Your team is already familiar with it

• You're solving one specific, well-defined problem
• The task is repetitive and predictable
• Integration with your existing tools is the main value
• You'd only use a small fraction of a commercial tool's features
• You want to avoid another dependency on an external service

• "What percentage of this tool would we actually use?"
• "Could we explain this task as a simple checklist?"
• "Would a custom solution integrate better with what we already have?"
• "What's the total cost of the subscription over 3 years vs. building it once?"

The Bigger Picture

There's something deeper going on here. Every subscription you add is a dependency. A relationship with another company. A bet that they'll keep existing, keep their prices reasonable, keep their product relevant to your needs. And every subscription has an opportunity cost: that money could have gone toward something you actually own.

Every custom solution you build is an asset. Something you own. Something that works exactly how you need it to, because you made it that way.

I'm not saying never subscribe to anything. That would be ridiculous. I'm saying the default in our industry has swung too far toward "there's probably an app for that."

Sometimes the best solution is the one you build yourself. Not because it's cheaper (though it often is). Not because it's faster (though it can be). But because it's yours, it does exactly what you need, and it doesn't come with the baggage of features you'll never use, integrations you'll never configure, and dashboards you'll never check.

The next time you find yourself shopping for software to solve a simple problem, pause. Ask yourself: could we just build this?

The answer might surprise you.