Build vs. buy: The cost of reinventing a composable web platform

We’ll keep this section brief, but it’s important to call out. Whether you’re a business building hardware or software, services, or something entirely different, how you deliver experiences to your customers is paramount and one of the greatest points of differentiation. 

It may be internal processes, your website, your customer service, a product feature, the list goes on. But we encourage you to take a moment to jot down what you think makes you different before continuing.

Remember, while customer experience may fall on another team like marketing, sales, or customer success, you have choices to make that will have a trickle effect. Poor website and application speed, performance, and usability could make or break your business.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s continue.

Unlike a pizza, there are many ways to slice this pie. Let’s start with verticals. Whatever vertical your business operates in will greatly determine how you evaluate the technology that will differentiate your business. Therefore which technology you may consider building versus buying. If you compare a fintech company to healthcare, manufacturing, or consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies, for example, the core business needs and customer experience expectations will vary greatly. 

Beyond just the vertical, each functional unit within an organization will have different application needs as well—marketing, engineering, sales…and so on. However, for the sake of this guide, we’ll focus on the experiences that touch the customer through a web-enabled application. 

Because that’s probably why you’re here. You’ve thought, “I could build this on AWS, GCP, or Azure,” but you’re currently thinking: “Should I?”  

Ultimately, there are four main areas to evaluate:

1. Differentiation

2. Commodity vs. bespoke

3. Agility and speed

4. Innovation

Let’s get started.

If you haven’t already, now’s the time to consider your differentiation. What differentiates your business from the competition isn’t necessarily set in stone. In fact, two companies operating within the same industry may differentiate themselves differently. (Duh.) As mentioned previously, it could be something that provides operational efficiency to employees as well as something externally facing.

Let’s take two direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses for example. 

Perhaps one business prides itself on outstanding customer service—constant availability, quick response times, and unparalleled communication. In comparison, another invests heavily in its website’s ability to deliver exceptional AI-enabled personalization. In these cases, the decision to build vs. buy is very different. (More on this in the next section.)

Once you’ve determined what differentiates your business, the IT solution will be clearer. While both examples improve the customer experience, you have to consider which is truly bespoke and therefore may need to be built.

Let’s continue the analogy.

Building a near copy of a commercially available application may not be the best use of time. In the example above, while customer service is paramount for the first business, many viable options exist for handling support inquiries. So why build another?

But when it comes to your website, there’s a lot more nuance. In this case, AI personalization is the differentiator. So it may make sense to buy ecommerce services that offer simplified AI personalization tools that integrate with your developer platforms. However, you may not want to build an entire developer platform to stand up your website or app. With something like Netlify, you can automate all the chores involved in website management like CI/CD, edge functions, deploy previews, and so much more—allowing you to focus on what differentiates your business. In this case, AI.

When it comes to building a website, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into it. If you’re a large enterprise, like Delta Airlines, for example, building your website and ticket purchasing platform yourself may make perfect sense because of the sheer complexity alone. But if you’re a DTC brand like the above, automate away as much complexity as you can so you can focus on what truly differentiates you. It’s unlikely that creating a bespoke and hard-to-maintain composable web platform will be it.

No matter which option you choose, remember that innovation may be fleeting. What makes you stand out today could change in the future as people commercialize solutions that you once built bespoke. Don’t be afraid to pivot as new tools come into the market. Continuing to maintain the solutions you’ve built will only become more and more complex as your business grows, leaving you less time to innovate when you’re focused on maintaining.

There’s an old saying in web development that if a project took a week, four days were spent setting up the environment and installing dependencies. This delays your time to value with operational work. When it comes to evaluating buying a composable web platform or building one yourself, think of it in these terms:

• Time

• Quality

• Scalability

• Total cost of ownership (TCO)

All of these concepts will help you to determine what it takes to build or buy a composable web platform.

It might be obvious, but when you build something yourself, it will take longer to realize its value than when you buy a similar solution. In other words, when you buy something that’s ready to go out of the box, you unlock its value immediately. What’s more, when you buy something, you’ve bought into that product’s innovation, so you also unlock all the new stuff without ever having to build it yourself.

When it comes to quality you have to consider: Can I operate the solution I built as good or better than the solution I could have bought? For a composable web platform like Netlify, we have an entire site reliability engineering (SRE) team focused on maintaining our platform so you don’t have to. 

Peace of mind goes a long way. If you build a solution yourself, how do you plan to maintain security, reporting, and observability? These are all things that you’ll have to hire the right people for and continuously maintain.

Building your own solution can become complex, fast. Over time, as your business changes, you may find yourself building a complex web of software integrations. Or worse, you may over-customize prepurchased solutions so much that the original thing you purchased is unrecognizable. 

In either situation, you’ve made it very difficult to change or replace systems. Even worse, you’ve created vendor lock-in because you’ve built so many custom integrations on top of a solution you’ve purchased. 

With Netlify and a composable architecture approach, it’s easy to abstract away these complexities by simply swapping in and out the tools you need as you need them—eliminating technical debt and avoiding the dreaded frankensystem.

The total cost of ownership for a solution you buy rather than build can be evaluated by considering all the factors above, and some not mentioned yet. Of course, your time to value will be faster when you buy a solution because you’re not spending time building or maintaining it, but the price of innovation must be considered too. 

Every time you build something innovative, you’ll need to continue that pace of innovation on a product that may or may not differentiate your business. What’s worse, you’ll have to retain people with the specific knowledge required to innovate in this area. 

Beyond this, you’ll also have to factor in the cost of compute that you buy but never use. It’s estimated that between 30% and 50% of total capacity sits idle due to factors like fluctuating demand, inefficient resource allocation, and over-provisioning.

And that’s just the high level. In this next section, we’ll walk you through the cost implications of building each component of a composable web platform.

As we detailed above, there’s a lot to consider—more generally—when deciding whether to build or buy a solution. However, when it comes to a developer platform, the choice is a little more clear. With modern computing, edge networks, CDN, and serverless, orchestrating all of this yourself will require a lot of overhead and a full team of experts with networking, security, and site reliability, as well as frontend and backend backgrounds.

And that’s not to say you can’t. For some companies, it makes sense. So let’s break down the different components you’ll have to consider building yourself if you don’t opt for an all-in-one platform.

Going the traditional cloud infrastructure route vs Netlify represents a fundamental shift in both operations and cost structure.

For a similar developer experience with a cloud provider, it would require deploying, maintaining, and securing:

• Application gateways 

• Load balancers

• CDN distributions

• CI/CD pipelines and deployment tooling

• Monitoring and observability systems

• Security maintenance and updates

• Fail-over strategy and disaster recovery

• Auto-scaling configuration and capacity planning

• Secrets and Cert management

This is all you need before you can start adding the fancy stuff like preview environments, instant rollbacks, integrations that operate from build all the way to the edge, etc.

Not only does this require significant time spent on infrastructure instead of innovation, but it also introduces upfront capacity costs regardless of usage, complex capacity planning and provisioning, added operational overhead, and security risks.

Netlify abstracts away this complexity while providing enterprise-grade features out of the box. You can rest assured with our 99.99% uptime SLA, infrastructure that scales automatically with traffic, and zero overhead. This allows your team to focus on building features that differentiate your business rather than managing infrastructure and costs.

At Netlify, we offer an all-in-one platform for web development that includes seamless integration with Git version control and a robust CI/CD pipeline.

With Netlify’s CI/CD, you can trigger automatic builds and deployments whenever code changes are pushed to the repository. Netlify automatically builds the website or application, runs tests, and deploys it to a staging environment or deploy preview. This allows your developers, QA teams, and stakeholders to preview and test changes before promoting them to production.

If ever you notice something needs to be corrected, we offer instant rollback that reverts changes and restores a previous deployment. 

If you opt to build this yourself, you’ll likely need to have an engineer on-call in case any issues arise in the build pipeline. When you pull engineering resources away from critical business needs, the result is often technical debt and less focus on higher-value initiatives. In some cases, the average developer may spend an entire day or more per week maintaining the infrastructure.

Changes to your website or app are collaborative and time-consuming. Frankly, what you push to production isn’t always what your customers experience. With Netlify, you can see the changes exactly how they appear to your customers, affording you the opportunity to provide feedback in the same context as your users. With collaborative deploy previews, you can streamline collaboration with both technical and non-technical stakeholders (like marketing teams) to ensure your vision is executed as planned. 

Additionally, with Netlify, your team can focus less on maintaining production environments and free up time to work on projects that differentiate your business.

The downside of building yourself:

• Slower time to market through disjointed review cycles

• Maintain your own staging environments

• Time-consuming to build a collaborative tooling system

• Frequently deal with merge conflicts

• And missed deadlines as a result of the above

Web frameworks aren’t what they used to be. These days, frameworks tend to provide very minimal default experiences unless they can provision server, edge, or other infrastructure on behalf of the site to unlock the full value of the framework. As new advancements are released, they can have new requirements for the infrastructure to work well. Supporting them requires expertise across the stack. 

We’ve found that the teams with expertise in the web framework aren’t those with expertise in the infrastructure. This is just one more important layer that has to be solved before anything of differentiated value can start. 

Whether you use Next.js, Astro, or any other leading frontend framework, you can rest easy knowing Netlify will always offer full support. Not to mention, we offer an SDK, platform primitives, and a wealth of integrations to ensure you’ll always be able to use the full power of your preferred framework or toolset. 

The downside of building yourself:

• Broken integrations or custom integrations that require maintenance

• Constantly have to keep up with framework changes

• Coordinating with infrastructure teams to provision resources a full framework rollout needs.

• Tech debt focused on maintenance 

• A solution that’s difficult to evolve

Remember what we said at the beginning: Will the functionality of the application you’re choosing to build or buy differentiate my business? And will the functionality of the application improve my business’ overall customer experience?

When it comes to a composable web platform, in most cases, the answer is no. It will even actively prevent you from working on the differentiation that matters the most. The sheer amount of operational overhead, DevOps experience, and maintenance required to maintain all the elements of a platform like Netlify can be overwhelming.

Nonetheless, like with most things, there’s always the exception. And we’re here to help you figure out what’s best for your business.