Vendor vs. Builder – How to Decide What You Should Actually Code
- Brainz Magazine
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Written by Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, helping startup teams master their tech domain. With 25+ years of leadership in software and digital strategy, he blends enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, and AI know-how to guide fast-growing companies.
There is a point in every startup’s journey where “just build it” stops working. The early rush of coding everything in-house, the scrappy scripts, the custom dashboards, the hand-rolled backends, was fine when speed mattered more than strategy. But as traction grows, so does the surface area of decisions. Every feature now competes for scarce engineering hours, every integration becomes technical debt in disguise, and every vendor pitch tempts you with promises of “faster, cheaper, easier.”
This is where founders and CTOs earn their keep, deciding what is worth building and what is better bought. Get it wrong, and you will drown in maintenance, lock-in, or miss an opportunity. Get it right, and your team focuses on what truly differentiates you.
The false economy of control
The default instinct in technical teams is to build. It feels purer, more controllable, more ours. But control is expensive and often illusory.
McKinsey (2022) estimated that 10 to 20 percent of engineering budgets in digital firms are consumed by maintaining internally built systems that add no competitive advantage. Worse, those same systems slow delivery. Hidden complexity compounds until simple changes require multi-sprint rewrites.
The irony is that startups often overinvest in the plumbing, components like authentication, billing, and dashboards, while underinvesting in the differentiator, the thing users actually pay for.
Every custom component you own demands attention forever. Vendors do not just sell convenience; they sell focus.
A founder once told me proudly that they had built a custom analytics stack to avoid paying Mixpanel. They saved 800 dollars a month. They spent three engineer months integrating and debugging. It is not thrift, it is false economy.
The three strategic questions
Before deciding to build anything, ask three deceptively simple questions.
Is it core? Does this capability define your value proposition or your user experience? If so, own it. That is where differentiation lives.
Is it a commodity? Is it a solved problem, like authentication, invoicing, or email delivery, that users will never thank you for reinventing? Then buy it, or use an open, well-maintained service.
Is it context? Does it support your product but not define it, like monitoring, CI or CD, or CRM tooling? Then extend it. Use a vendor’s backbone and customise only where it gives insight or efficiency.
This triage aligns with Simon Wardley’s mapping logic, treating technology as evolving capital. What is innovative today becomes a commodity tomorrow. Smart teams adjust their build versus buy boundaries accordingly.
When building becomes a trap
Custom code feels like craftsmanship until you have to maintain it.
The builder’s trap happens when pride and momentum override pragmatism. You start rationalising, we will reuse it later, we will open source it someday. However, reuse rarely happens, and someday is when your backlog is already out of control.
Atlassian’s latest developer experience research shows developers lose significant time to organisational inefficiencies and fragmented workflows, and satisfaction with DevEx improvements remains low. Additionally, Atlassian reports that 97 percent of developers are losing a notable amount of time to inefficiencies, despite gains made with AI. That is not innovation, that is inertia.
The sunk cost fallacy makes it worse. Once you have sunk weeks into a home-grown tool, you feel compelled to keep polishing it, even if a vendor product could replace it tomorrow. It is technical debt disguised as pride.
If a problem is common enough that there is a SaaS tool for it, assume the market has already spent thousands of engineering years solving it better than you can afford to.
When buying becomes a crutch
The opposite extreme is just as dangerous. Founders overwhelmed by vendor tools end up stitching together a Frankenstein stack, authentication from one provider, analytics from another, and workflow automation from a third. Everything works until it does not.
Vendor dependence creates subtle fragility.
Lock-in. APIs, pricing models, and data schemas evolve faster than your contracts. Migrating becomes near impossible without downtime.
Opaque cost curves. Entry-level pricing often masks scale effects. Organisations routinely discover hidden cloud costs such as idle resources, over-provisioning, and licence sprawl.
Feature inertia. You end up constrained by vendor roadmaps. Innovation slows to the pace of their product cycle.
The more you outsource your differentiator, the harder it becomes to pivot. Buying everything is not leverage; it is dependency dressed as efficiency.
Hybrid strategies that win
The most resilient startups employ hybrid strategies, buy where maturity is beneficial, build where differentiation is present, and extend the rest.
Build the experience layer. Own the parts users touch and associate with your brand, the logic, workflows, and moments that define value.
Buy the infrastructure layer. Use managed databases, auth providers, and cloud functions to offload undifferentiated complexity.
Extend the intelligence layer. Integrate external APIs such as analytics, AI, or payments, but wrap them in your own abstraction to allow for easy replacement later.
This is how platforms like Shopify and Stripe scaled sustainably. They offered primitives, not monoliths, small, replaceable components around which you can innovate.
Forsgren, Humble, and Kim (2018) in Accelerate demonstrate that elite teams utilise loosely coupled systems, small batches, and rapid feedback to enhance delivery performance. They know what to own and what to outsource. It is not about how much code they write; it is about writing only what matters.
The decision framework: Build, buy, or extend
Capability | Recommended action | Why |
Authentication / IAM | Buy | Security and compliance risk; no competitive edge. |
Billing & Invoicing | Buy/Extend | SaaS APIs (Stripe, Paddle) cover 90% of needs; customise receipts or workflows. |
Analytics / BI | Extend | Use PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Looker; add custom event logic to match your metrics. |
Core Recommendation / Matching Engine | Build | Proprietary algorithms = defensible IP. |
CI/CD Pipelines | Extend | Start with GitHub or GitLab CI; automate unique deployment logic later. |
Search or AI Enrichment | Hybrid | Use third-party models (e.g. OpenAI, Bedrock) but wrap them in your domain layer to preserve flexibility. |
Documentation or Internal Tools | Buy, then Replace | Off-the-shelf early; replace once collaboration complexity demands it. |
A good litmus test is this. If removing a component tomorrow does not change your competitive story, you should not be maintaining it today.
The real ROI: Focus and leverage
Investors do not just look for elegant code, they look for judgment. A company that builds its differentiator and buys its hygiene shows technical maturity.
Every hour you spend coding a login flow is an hour not spent improving product-market fit. Every dependency you add is a potential delay in the due diligence process.
Marty Cagan (2020) reminds us in Empowered that the best product organisations measure output in impact, not features. Choosing what not to build is as strategic as shipping fast.
The 2024 DORA report emphasises user centricity, stable priorities, and platform engineering as levers for faster, more reliable delivery. The less time you waste reinventing the wheel, the more time you spend learning from users.
Beyond code: A cultural shift
Mature startups develop a cultural instinct for leverage. They ask:
Could someone else do this better or cheaper?
If we buy now, what would force a rebuild later?
If we build, can we maintain it in a year?
These are not technical questions, they are leadership questions.
Great CTOs strike a balance between craft and capital discipline. They understand that every new system is a promise to maintain, monitor, and migrate someday.
In a healthy culture, engineers feel pride not in the volume of code written but in the number of problems solved with minimal new code. That is what investors notice, a team that spends its effort where it compounds.
Closing thoughts: Code less, learn more
Software is not an asset until it delivers learning or leverage. Everything else is liability.
Founders who build everything end up tired. Those who buy everything end up trapped. The winners are those who treat code as capital, invest where it multiplies value, and outsource where it does not.
As your startup grows, remember, you do not get points for reinventing the wheel. You get results for reaching the destination first, and on wheels that can actually scale.
Read more from Alberto Zuin
Alberto Zuin, CTO/CIO
Alberto Zuin is a fractional CTO/CIO and the founder of MOYD, Master of Your (Tech) Domain. With over 25 years of experience in tech leadership, he helps startups and scaleups align their technology with business strategy. His background spans enterprise architecture, cybersecurity, AI, and agile delivery. Alberto holds an MBA in Technology Management and several top-tier certifications, including CGEIT and CISM. Passionate about mentoring founders, he focuses on helping teams build secure, scalable, and purpose-driven digital products.
Sources:
Atlassian (2024). Developer Experience Trends Report. Available here.
Cagan, M. (2020). Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products. Wiley.
Google / DORA (2024). Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024. Available here.
Forsgren, N., Humble, J., and Kim, G. (2018). Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps – Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations. IT Revolution Press.
Gartner (2025). Cost Optimization Done Right — Even in a Volatile Economy. Available here.
McKinsey & Company (2022). Tech Debt: Reclaiming Tech Equity. Available here.
Wardley, S. (2016). On Mapping. Available here.
