Thread by @amontalenti

Let's take a quick moment to talk about the famed "build vs buy" argument that specialized tech vendors often hear from customers.

For example, I'll occasionally come across prospective customer who says, "We're debating whether to license your software, or roll our own."

I'll start w/ cloud costs. We spend >$1million per year in cloud costs. We're a ~25-person tech team serving ~350-400 enterprise customers. Our aggregate cost is lower due to economy of scale.

But *your* cloud cost, alone, to "roll your own" is likely higher than our TCO to you.

OK, let's move to SaaS costs. We spend about $250K/year on SaaS services that run our product. These are things like alerting/monitoring tools, end-user performance monitoring, data enrichment, exception trace capture, deployment, CI, testing.

All these are amortized for you.

OK, let's move on to human cost. You can sign our contract today, get our service today, and benefit from hundreds of person-years of experience in *exactly this problem*. As for rolling your own? You'll start from scratch.

Remember, in the long run, we're all dead.

OK, let's move on to quality. Who has a better track record for shipping the goods? A team that solved this problem for hundreds of other clients who had the exact same problem -- closing >10,000 support tickets along the way?

Or the internal team that thinks this might be fun?

OK, let's look at maintenance. Do you have a 24x7 on-call team setup? Are you ready to? Do you have support ticket process, SLOs, SLAs, and escalation policies?

We've already got all of that, and it's been operating for years, and you get it for free, when you sign.

I get it. There's no glory in signing a SaaS contract to solve a problem. It seems too easy. You press a button, and it's solved. What's the fun in that?

"Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential."

You know what's fun? Keeping things simple.

And I get it. I'm biased, as the CTO of a SaaS company.

You'll say -- what about Customization? IP Ownership? Counter-Party Risk? Roadmap Control? Our Niche and Special Requirements?

Good questions, but...

... just recognize what you're doing with these questions. You're reverse-justifying a Not-Invented-Here Bias. Every single one of those arguments? People used to make them about cloud hosting, open source, and so on.

If the SaaS actually solves it, it solves it for everyone.