Buy: Rent a product someone else builds and runs
Sign a contract, configure, integrate. Days, not quarters.
✦Still fast. AI mostly speeds up the integration work on your side.
Thousands of customers fund the edge cases, so you get years of hardening for a subscription.
✦When building gets cheaper, the discount you get from shared R&D gets smaller, especially for thin CRUD tools.
SOC 2, PCI, ISO and uptime SLAs come in the box. Someone else is on-call.
✦AI can write code quickly. It can't write trust, certifications or audit history.
The vendor handles upgrades, security patches and scaling. Your team stays on your product.
✦Still true, but AI shrinks the maintenance cost of the Build alternative, so the gap narrows.
Some products are valuable because of their network or dataset, like fraud signals or bank connectivity.
✦Proprietary networks and data can't be generated. These vendors get more defensible.
Data, workflows and integrations pile up. Leaving becomes a project in itself.
✦Agents write migration scripts and adapters, so leaving is cheaper than it used to be. It's still not free.
Per-seat and per-transaction pricing grows linearly while your costs to build would stay flat.
✦Unchanged, and more visible now that Build is cheaper to compare against.
You bend your process to the tool. The last 20% is workarounds, spreadsheets and glue.
✦Vendors ship AI configurability, and your glue code gets cheaper to write.
Your competitors can buy the exact same thing tomorrow.
✦When everyone buys the same AI-enabled SaaS, it stops being an advantage for anyone.
Price hikes, acquisitions, shutdowns, roadmap changes. Your fate is tied to theirs.
✦Many AI-era vendors are young, and incumbents are being disrupted. Vendor churn is higher.
- →It is commodity: every company needs it, none wins with it
- →Trust, certification or a network is the product
- →You need it this week
- →Usage is small enough that fees stay trivial
- why it mattersLook at how pricing scales. A $20 seat looks cheap at 10 people and costs more than an engineer at 1,000.
- why it mattersAsk what the vendor's moat is. If it's the UI, a coding agent can rebuild it. If it's licenses, data or network, keep paying them.
- why it mattersBuy the boring layer and own the integration layer. Your glue code is where process fit lives, and it's cheap to write now.