SaaS

Economists call this the “make-or-buy” decision: a rational actor produces something themselves only when the total cost, including time and opportunity costs, is lower than the cost of buying it from someone else.

When a company pays for Notion, or Jira, or Basecamp, or any other tool, they’re paying for what thousands of engineers, compliance officers, security auditors, and domain experts have built and refined over years, sometimes decades. They’re paying for the institutional knowledge in the codebase, the integration ecosystem, the regulatory certifications, the support infrastructure. They’re paying for reliability, predictability, and the peace of mind that comes with knowing someone else keeps the lights on.

A company that decides to build its own version using AI coding tools is buying a bread machine. The ingredients are cheap, and the machine does most of the work, but they’re now the baker. They own the maintenance, edge cases, and security gaps that AI-generated code tends to introduce; AI-generated code has about 1.7 times as many major issues as code written by humans. They own the compliance audits and the 2 AM phone call when the tool breaks and someone has to fix it. And six months later, the person who built the thing has moved to another team, and nobody else understands how it works.

It runs on something more basic than technology: people, and the organizations they build, will always prefer to pay someone else to handle complexity if the price is reasonable and the trust is there.

AI makes the “make” side of that decision look cheap, because it collapses the one cost that used to dominate: writing the code. But building was never the expensive part. Owning it is — the maintenance, the audits, the 2 AM call — and none of that gets cheaper. It just stays hidden until the bill comes due.