Should you build or buy your developer portal?

Many engineering teams get excited about the prospect of building internal tools to aid their software development processes. Creating slick internal tools seems like a fun engineering challenge and a way to show off your technical chops. However, developing internal tools comes with many hidden costs that are often underestimated. In this post, we'll explore the pitfalls of building internal tools and when it may actually make more sense to buy off-the-shelf solutions.

The High Costs of Building and Maintaining Tools

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Building internal developer tools requires significant infrastructure, engineering time for ongoing maintenance, and has the opportunity cost of not focusing engineers on core business goals. While it may seem easy at first to spin up tools tailored to your team's needs, the long-term costs add up quickly. You need infrastructure like databases and servers, as well as dedicated engineers for upkeep. And time spent on internal tools means less time delivering value to customers. Buying tools is often cheaper in total cost of ownership.

Questionable Justifications for Custom Tools

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Teams often try justifying custom tools because their needs are "unique", to avoid vendor lock-in, due to procurement challenges, or to reduce costs. But these reasons usually don't hold up. Many problems are not as unique as we think - vendors solve similar problems across clients. Vendor lock-in can happen with internal tools too if they tangle your processes. Procurement skills can be developed. And building tools is usually more expensive than buying.

Valid Reasons to Build Tools

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There are some valid reasons to build internal tools. If you have truly novel needs not addressed by vendors, then custom tools may be your only option. Sometimes internal tools can provide competitive differentiation. And occasionally there are no vendor solutions for your specific use case. But these situations are less common than we admit. Carefully evaluate if custom tools are absolutely necessary before deciding to incur the costs.

Prioritize Flexible and Collaborative Vendors  

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Modern vendor tools often allow customization, extensibility, and data ownership. Seek out vendors open to collaborating with you versus rigid off-the-shelf products. Find partners willing to co-design solutions to meet your needs instead of forcing you into inflexible platforms. With the right vendor relationship, custom tools may be avoidable.

Beware Long-Term Maintenance Costs

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Building internal tools can temporarily help with engineering hiring by providing interesting problems to solve. But maintaining complex internal tools over time has high turnover costs. Engineers don't want to be stuck supporting old internal platforms forever. This can lead to attrition if engineers don't feel challenged. The excitement of tool building fades quickly when maintenance becomes all-consuming.

Building internal developer tools has many hidden costs that are rarely considered upfront. From infrastructure to maintenance to opportunity costs, custom tools are expensive in total cost of ownership. Carefully analyze your motivations and needs before deciding they are necessary. For many needs, off-the-shelf solutions can actually be more flexible and cost-effective with the right vendor relationship and procurement strategy. While internal tools may seem appealing at first, understand the tradeoffs before diverging from your core business goals.

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