Build vs. Buy: The Software Dilemma Every Company Faces

The team spots a bottleneck - maybe it’s customer data, internal reporting, or sales-process visibility. Someone says, “We could build something for that.” It’s tempting. You know your business better than anyone. Why not create a custom tool that fits like a glove?

This is where the story splits. Some teams build in-house. Others buy off-the-shelf. Builders sometimes end up buried in upkeep and technical debt, while buyers solve the problem and move forward. But it’s not always that simple, both paths have trade-offs.

Let’s explore what happens down both paths.

‍

When Even an AI Company Chooses to Buy

Even cutting-edge tech companies face the build vs. buy dilemma. Anthropic, an AI research startup, needed a scalable way to support its fast-growing user base. As an AI pioneer, Anthropic easily could have built its own AI-powered support agent. But instead of pouring months into a DIY solution, the team partnered with Intercom to deploy the Fin AI customer service agent. The result? Anthropic hit the ground running in under a week (intercom.com) with an AI support system that rivaled what they could have built internally:

• 50%+ of inquiries resolved by AI: In just one month, Fin was automatically resolving over 50% of all customer queries. Tens of thousands of questions that would have burdened human agents were handled instantly by Fin.
  
  
• Massive time savings: By offloading repetitive questions to Fin, Anthropic saved more than 1,700 support hours in the first month alone. The support team could refocus on complex, high-value customer issues.
  
  
• 24/7 scalability: With a primarily US-based team, Anthropic struggled to cover global time zones. Fin gave them round-the-clock support coverage, ensuring users worldwide get instant answers even while the human team sleeps.
  

“If you’re debating whether to build your own AI solution or buy one… my advice would be to buy – and specifically, buy Fin,” says Emily Lampert, Anthropic’s Head of Product Support. Anthropic’s experience shows that buying software isn’t just a shortcut – it’s an accelerator. Instead of waiting months for an MVP, they plugged into a battle-tested platform and deployed a world-class solution in days. The payoff was immediate: enterprise-grade AI with the safety, reliability, and quality their brand required – all without derailing their core mission of building transformative AI.

Attention’s Take on Build vs. Buy

In fast-moving markets, especially in the world of AI agents, the build vs. buy equation tilts heavily toward buying. Agent use cases are evolving so quickly that anything you build today risks being outdated in a few months. Standing up and maintaining your own agents is resource-intensive: every new feature or field isn’t just a toggle, it’s a redesign. Without a platform, you’re starting from square one each time, slowing execution and stretching timelines.

Attention delivers something DIY efforts can’t match: agility at scale. It’s one thing to create a workflow from a single conversation; it’s another to run trend analysis across thousands of calls and hundreds of deals. Doing that in-house is technically complex, time-consuming, and often infeasible. Attention gives you that capability out of the box - fully integrated, fully maintained - so you can pivot, reprioritize, and deploy without losing momentum.

Another key advantage is integration flexibility. Your sales, product, and support teams all work in different systems, and Attention meets them where they are. Our platform acts as connective tissue - linking the right calls, emails, and CRM records - so insights flow to the right teams without data wrangling. The result: faster go-to-market, sharper coaching, cleaner CRM data, and the ability to adapt as your strategy changes.

But buying isn’t always the right move, and here’s why.

The Pros of Building vs. Buying

Why Build?

• Deep customization: Aligns perfectly with your unique workflows.
• Full control: Over data, security, and IP.
• No vendor dependency: You own the roadmap and aren’t bound by another company’s priorities.
• Transparency: Less of a “black box” than third-party software.

Why Buy?

• Speed: Rapidly deploy in days or weeks, not months.
• Agility: Quickly adapt to market changes without rebuilding.
• Lower maintenance: Vendor handles updates, bug fixes, and scaling.
• Integration-ready: APIs and connectors to plug into your current systems.

The Hidden Cost of Spreadsheets

Sometimes the “build vs. buy” question isn’t about code, but about clinging to familiar tools like Excel. Globalization Partners, a rapidly growing SaaS company, learned this when its revenue operations outgrew a patchwork of spreadsheets. At first, tracking sales forecasts in Excel seemed fine. But as the business scaled, cracks appeared:

• The forecasting spreadsheet process “was a mess” – updates became a nightmare and visibility into the pipeline was severely limited (clari.com).
• Managers found themselves updating a shared sheet six times per day, constantly tweaking numbers and chasing version control issues.
• Despite Herculean manual efforts, data was often out of sync and important deal insights slipped through the cracks.

The team hit a breaking point and implemented a dedicated RevOps platform (Clari) to bring order to the chaos. In just 90 days, they rolled out the new system across the company, immediately reaping benefits. Forecast accuracy and efficiency surged – the number of “slipped” deals (late-stage opportunities that pushed out or fell through) dropped by 39% after moving off spreadsheets. Instead of wasting time on copy-paste and guesswork, the sales leaders suddenly had real-time, trustworthy pipeline visibility. 

This is the hidden truth of DIY spreadsheet solutions: they seem cheap and easy until the complexity of business outgrows them. Investing in purpose-built software plugged revenue leaks and freed up countless hours that Globalization Partners could redirect toward closing deals rather than updating cells.

The Myth of “We’re Different”

The most common objection to buying software? “Our use case is too unique.” It’s easy to believe that your business processes are special. But for most companies, 90% of the workflow is the same: contact management, reporting, integrations with email and calendars, billing logic, support ticketing. That’s exactly what off-the-shelf tools excel at. And for the remaining truly unique 10%? Great platforms are built to flex – with APIs, plug-ins, custom objects, and configuration options to cover whatever special cases you have.

Buying doesn’t mean settling or sacrificing your uniqueness. It means starting with a strong foundation and only customizing the edges, not reinventing the core from scratch. Even companies that once went the custom route eventually learn this.

So When Should You Build?

There are good reasons to build in-house. You should consider building from scratch only if you can confidently check all of these boxes:

• Your product is the software. If the tool in question is your company’s core product or secret sauce, building it may be mission-critical. (If you’re a SaaS company selling a CRM, then yes, you need to build your own CRM!)
• No off-the-shelf tool fits. If you’ve truly scoured the market and nothing comes close to your needs, a custom build might be justified. This is rare, though – in today’s SaaS landscape, viable options exist for most problems.
• You have the long-term resources to maintain it. Building is not a one-time project; it’s a promise to own an entire software lifecycle. Do you have the engineering bandwidth to handle ongoing updates, bug fixes, scaling, support, and security for the foreseeable future?
  
  

Unless you’re confidently checking those boxes, you’re better off focusing your team’s firepower on what makes you great – not on reinventing infrastructure that others have perfected.

The Best Builders Know When Not to Build 

Every hour your team spends designing and maintaining internal tools is an hour not spent driving revenue, improving your actual product, or serving customers. The fastest-scaling companies internalize this. They don’t waste time reinventing billing systems, CRMs, analytics dashboards, or support platforms from scratch. They buy best-in-class solutions, plug them in, and get back to the real work that differentiates their business.

In the end, software should move your business forward, not hold it back. The question to ask isn’t just “Can we build this?” but “Will building this make us more successful?” More often than not, the answer is no – not because your engineers lack skill, but because their talents are more impactful elsewhere. The smartest builders know when to leverage existing tools so they can devote their energy to true innovation.

‍