SaaS Product Development: Build vs Buy in 2024

The build-versus-buy decision has been a staple of technology strategy for decades, but 2024 has fundamentally altered the equation. AI-assisted development tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude have reduced the time and cost of building custom software by 30 to 50 percent for many categories of application. Simultaneously, the SaaS market has matured to the point where there are multiple credible vendors for virtually every business function, making the "buy" option more capable than ever.

This creates a paradox: building is cheaper and buying is better, yet the wrong choice in either direction is more expensive than before. Building when you should buy wastes development resources on undifferentiated functionality. Buying when you should build locks you into a vendor's roadmap and prevents you from creating the proprietary capabilities that differentiate your business. The stakes of getting this decision right have never been higher.

Through my work at GVDworks advising founder-led businesses, I have developed a framework that cuts through the analysis paralysis. The core question is not "can we build this?" (the answer is almost always yes) or "does a product exist?" (the answer is also almost always yes). The core question is: "Is this capability a source of competitive advantage, and will owning it compound our differentiation over time?"

Category one: commoditised infrastructure. This includes email delivery, payment processing, authentication, hosting, and monitoring. Always buy. These are complex, security-critical systems where vendors invest millions in reliability, compliance, and edge-case handling. No mid-market business should be building its own payment gateway or email infrastructure. The total cost of ownership for custom-built infrastructure always exceeds the subscription cost once you factor in maintenance, security patching, and compliance updates.

Category two: core differentiators. These are the capabilities that define why customers choose you over alternatives. If your competitive advantage lies in a unique algorithm, a proprietary data pipeline, a distinctive user experience, or a specialised workflow, build it. These systems are where your intellectual property lives, and outsourcing them to a generic SaaS product is outsourcing your competitive advantage. At Veldspark Labs, our lead scoring algorithms and data enrichment pipelines are custom-built precisely because they are the product.

Category three: operational enablers. CRM, project management, HR, accounting, and internal communication tools are necessary but rarely differentiating. Buy best-in-class SaaS, but invest in integration. The value of these tools multiplies when they share data seamlessly with your core systems. Allocate 20 to 30 percent of your "buy" budget to integration engineering, whether through native connectors, iPaaS platforms like Make or n8n, or custom API middleware.

The most sophisticated technology strategies in 2024 are neither pure-build nor pure-buy but composable architectures that assemble best-in-class components into a unified system. Headless commerce is the poster child: buy Shopify or commercetools for the commerce engine, build a custom front-end for differentiated user experience, use a third-party search provider for product discovery, and layer your own AI-powered recommendation engine on top. Each component is optimised for its role, and the architecture allows you to swap any layer without rebuilding the whole.

Low-code and no-code platforms have carved out a legitimate middle ground for internal tools and operational workflows. Platforms like Retool, Superblocks, and Glide allow non-developers to build functional internal applications while developers focus on the high-value custom work. This is not about replacing developers; it is about matching the right level of engineering investment to the right category of problem.

AI is accelerating the convergence of build and buy. AI-generated code is making it faster to build custom integrations between bought products. AI-powered SaaS products are offering levels of customisation that previously required custom development. And AI agents are beginning to orchestrate workflows across multiple SaaS tools in ways that blur the line between using a product and programming it. The winners in this environment are leaders who think in terms of capabilities and outcomes rather than build-or-buy binaries.