Build, Buy, or Wait
The build-versus-buy debate misses the third option that's right more often than either: deliberately doing nothing yet.
Buy the commodity, build the difference
The rule is old because it's right: if a capability doesn't differentiate you, buy it and move on — accounting, ticketing, email. Build only where your way of doing something is the reason customers choose you. The expensive failures sit in the middle: companies building commodity software out of pride, and companies renting their core differentiator from a vendor who also rents it to their competitors.
Passive waiting is neglect; active waiting is strategy.
The case for waiting
Waiting is underrated because it looks like indecision. But when a category is moving fast — as AI tooling is now — six months of patience routinely buys you a better, cheaper, more proven option. The discipline is to make waiting active: name the trigger that ends the wait, instrument the pain you're tolerating, and review on a date. Passive waiting is neglect; active waiting is strategy.
Total cost includes attention
Every system you build claims a slice of your team's attention forever. The honest build-versus-buy ledger counts that attention: who upgrades it, who answers questions about it, who gets paged. Some builds are cheap to write and ruinous to own. We've seen more companies wounded by software they built casually than by software they bought carelessly.
If this sounds like a conversation your team is having, we should have it together.