Fractional CTO
'Build vs buy' is usually framed as a technical question, but the deciding factors are almost always business ones: how specific your workflow really is, how fast the category is evolving, and what it costs you if the vendor you pick disappears or changes its pricing.
Most businesses assume their process is unique. An outside engineer separates the parts that genuinely are from the parts every off-the-shelf tool already handles.
Subscription cost over three years against a build-and-maintain cost, including the hosting, updates and the day someone has to fix it.
One page: which option fits your size and how specific your needs are, and what would have to change for the other answer to become correct later.
Getting it wrong in either direction is expensive. Building custom software for a problem three SaaS tools already solve burns months and leaves you maintaining code nobody needed to own. Buying a tool that cannot flex to what makes your business different means working around its limits forever, or migrating off it later at a worse time than now.
A short list that surfaces most of what actually matters.
That is exactly the bias this avoids. The advisor has no product to sell and no build contract riding on the answer, so 'buy, and here is why' is a completely normal outcome.
That happens. Sometimes the right call is to keep the spreadsheet a little longer until the process is stable enough to be worth encoding either way — and being told that saves more money than either path.
Yes, if that is the outcome. You are free to build it with anyone, including a developer found elsewhere here — the advisor has no stake in which developer you pick.
CTO & Founder at Punch AI | Building Software Harnesses for AI-Powered Development | PhD Student in Software Engineering
CTO and Founder at Punch AI, building software harnesses that make AI-powered development safer and more reliable. PhD student in Software Engineering, bridging applied AI engineering with academic research.
Tallinn, Estonia
Founder / Senior software developer
Founder and senior software developer building SaaS products end-to-end, from architecture and backend APIs to the shipped frontend. Focused on lean, maintainable systems for early-stage products.