Field Notes · By
What owning your own tools really costs
Building is the obvious cost. Here's the rest of the picture, honestly.
If you're weighing a custom tool against another subscription, the build price is only part of the story. Here's everything worth counting, on both sides.
The cost of renting
- The subscription, usually per seat, and usually rising.
- The workarounds: the copy-pasting between apps, the spreadsheet that fills the gaps, the person who "knows how it works".
- The tier creep: the one feature you need lives in the plan that costs twice as much.
- The lock-in: your data lives in their format, on their terms.
The cost of owning
- The build: a defined project, usually weeks to a few months.
- Hosting: for most small-business tools, modest compared with a few seats of SaaS.
- Upkeep: updates, small fixes, and improvements as your business changes. You can do this in-house, or have the team that built it look after it.
When owning wins
Owning makes the most sense when the tool touches your process every day, when you're paying for several tools that each do part of the job, or when the way you work is part of your edge.
When it doesn't
Commodity jobs like email, payroll and accounting are solved problems. Rent them, and spend your money on the tools that make your business different.
Want to see the numbers for your business? Tell us what you're paying for now and we'll give you an honest read.