Build or buy, now that anyone can build
A coding agent makes the first version of almost any tool cheap. Owning it for five years is a different question. Here is how to decide.
Part of our series on taste and shipping fast. Read with: SaaS isn't dead. Software without taste is.
"We could just build that" used to be a hard sell. Now it is often true by Friday. That changes the build-or-buy decision, but not the way it first seems. The cost of building fell. The cost of owning didn't.
Build it when
It is the thing your customers choose you for. Your own taste should live there, nowhere else.
It encodes how your company works in a way no product can, and that way is a real advantage.
It is small, internal and easy to throw away: a report, a script, a one-off tool.
Buy it, or start from a foundation, when
Getting it wrong hurts people or breaks the law: sign-in, payments, personal data, audit trails, backups.
Someone else has already made the hundred small decisions well, and you would only be repeating them, worse.
You would need to keep up with it for years: security fixes, regulation, integrations, the people who know it.
Five questions before you build
Who will own this in two years, by name?
What happens on its worst day, and who is woken up?
Which rules does it have to follow (GDPR, accessibility, tax, security), and who keeps track when they change?
Are we building something that makes us different, or something every company needs?
If we spent the same time on our own product instead, what would we ship?
This is the bet behind Rocket: the parts every SaaS product needs (sign-in, teams, billing, compliance, backups, the edge) are a foundation you start from, with their decisions already made and tested. Your time, and your agents' time, goes to the part only you can decide: what makes your product worth choosing.