"Buy versus build" is a false binary. Most of the good decisions we see sit in between: a platform like Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot or ServiceNow, configured — and lightly extended — to fit a process.
Four questions
- Is this process a differentiator? If it's how you win customers, owning it may be worth building. If it's how you pay invoices, buy or configure.
- How standard is it? If the industry already agrees on how it works, a platform will encode that better than you will.
- What happens in year three? Bespoke software needs a team forever. A platform needs an admin and a license budget that grows with headcount.
- How much will you fight the platform? If more than about 30% of requirements need custom code, you're building on someone else's foundations — often the worst of both worlds.
A quick scoring method
List your top 15 requirements. Mark each as out of the box, configuration, light extension or custom build for each candidate platform. Then total five-year cost of ownership: licenses, implementation, internal admin time and change requests.
We've seen this exercise turn a proposed $400,000 custom build into a $90,000 configuration project — and occasionally the reverse, when licensing at scale would have cost more than owning the software.
The right answer is the one you can still afford, and still change, three years from now.