The question "build vs buy" is becoming obsolete

There is a decision that has consumed countless hours of board meetings, IT strategy sessions, and procurement processes: should we build custom software or buy an off-the-shelf product?

It is the wrong question. And it is becoming more wrong by the month.

The original premise

The build vs buy dilemma made sense when it was coined. Building custom software required a team of developers, months of work, and ongoing maintenance costs that few businesses could justify. Buying a SaaS product spread those costs across thousands of customers, made the ongoing maintenance someone else's problem, and got you to market faster.

The logic was sound. For most businesses, most of the time, buying won.

What has changed

AI has eroded both sides of the equation simultaneously.

The cost of building has dropped significantly. What once required a team of five can now be done by one person with the right tools. A consultant with AI assistance can scope, build, and deliver a bespoke system in weeks rather than months. The maintenance burden, historically the killer argument against custom builds, has shrunk in proportion.

At the same time, the switching costs that kept SaaS products sticky are quietly dissolving. The main reason businesses stayed locked into platforms they had outgrown was not loyalty. It was the cost and complexity of moving. If rebuilding a CRM-like tool now takes a few weeks of consultancy time, that calculus changes.

The WordPress analogy

Nobody frames a website project as a build vs buy decision any more. You hire a WordPress consultant, or a Webflow agency, or a developer who knows the platform. The infrastructure is provided; the consultant shapes it to your needs; and you end up with something that fits your business, not a rental that fits everyone equally poorly.

That model is now extending into business software more broadly.

The consultant becomes the unit of trust, not the vendor. You are not evaluating Salesforce against HubSpot. You are evaluating which technical advisor can build and maintain the right system for your business, at a cost that makes sense.

What this means for businesses

For most small and mid-size businesses, the practical question is no longer whether to build. It is whether you have found the right person to build it for you, and whether they can own it sustainably over time.

That changes how you think about procurement. The key questions are not about features or pricing tiers. They are about maintainability, ownership, and what happens if the person who built the system is unavailable for six months.

Those are not new questions. They are the same ones any business should ask before commissioning a WordPress site. The difference is that businesses are comfortable with those risks at the website layer. They will need to become comfortable with them at the application layer too.

The remaining friction

The one thing custom builds do not yet solve cleanly is deep compliance and integration complexity. A business commissioning a custom HR tool still needs someone who understands employment law edge cases. A custom finance platform still needs to satisfy audit requirements.

This is where specialist consultants with domain knowledge, not just technical skills, become the scarce resource. The ability to write the code is increasingly commoditised. The ability to understand the domain well enough to build the right thing is not.

That distinction will matter more, not less, as the tools improve.

The framing shift that matters

Build vs buy was always a question about cost and capability. The cost side of that equation has shifted decisively. What remains is capability: finding someone with the right combination of technical skill and domain understanding to deliver and maintain what you actually need.

That is not a new kind of business relationship. It is the oldest one in professional services. It just applies to software now.