Build In-House Versus Buy a Vendor Tool
TradeoffStaffPrincipalUpdated
Your 200 engineers need on-call scheduling, paging, and incident timelines. Building it would take three engineers two quarters, and a vendor quotes $60,000 a year.
Short answer: Buy a Vendor Tool. Paging is undifferentiated work that vendors have hardened across thousands of customers, so the license is the cheaper and safer choice.
The Two Options
A
Build In-House
B
Buy a Vendor Tool
Drill This: Your Pick First
The Better Pick
Option B
Buy a Vendor Tool
Paging is undifferentiated work that vendors have hardened across thousands of customers, so the license is the cheaper and safer choice. Three engineers for two quarters costs several times the annual fee before counting years of maintenance, and a homegrown pager that fails during an outage is the worst failure it could have. Those engineers are worth more on the product customers pay for.
When the Other One Wins
Build In-House
When the tool is core to your differentiation or no vendor meets a hard constraint, such as air-gapped deployment or data residency, building is worth the ongoing cost.