Build vs Buy When Building Got Cheap

The spreadsheet says building is cheaper now, and the spreadsheet isn't wrong. A vendor's annual license on one line, a couple of developers and some tokens on the other. What that comparison leaves out is that building has always had two costs, and AI only made one of them smaller.

Kevin has spent most of his career firmly on the buy side, with a mantra he gave his teams for years: don't invent things that already exist. This episode is him revising that position rather than abandoning it, and being specific about how much smaller the revision is than the enthusiasm in the industry suggests.

He walks through a four-question test to run before agreeing to build something that already exists, covering blast radius, ownership cost, differentiation, and whether there's an exit path. Along the way: where building genuinely does make sense now, where it still doesn't regardless of how cheap it has become, the license cost trap that catches CFOs, why supply chain risk has started cutting in both directions, and the version of this decision that shows up in headcount instead of software. Two stories anchor it: an auth decision that gave back every dollar it saved and came within about a month of being much worse, and a build made deliberately with an exit already planned.

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• The book: It Depends: Writing on Technology 2012-2022 (https://itdependsbook.net)
• Your host: Kevin Goldsmith (https://kevingoldsmith.com)