Buying meant speed and lower risk. Building meant control, but at a cost most small teams couldn't justify; engineers, timelines, maintenance forever. So the default was "buy it," and you only built when the tool was genuinely core to your differentiation.

AI just moved the goalposts

The old calculation assumed building was expensive and slow. When a small team can now stand up a working internal tool in days instead of quarters, the "just buy HubSpot" reflex deserves a second look.

What's changed in favor of building: - Time-to-first-version has collapsed. A rough internal CRM is now a weekend, not a roadmap item. - You own your data and workflows instead of bending your process to fit someone else's product. - No per-seat pricing that punishes you for growing.

What hasn't changed: - Building the v1 was never the expensive part. Maintenance, security, edge cases, and support are. AI accelerates the first 80% and barely touches the last 20% - the part that actually costs you. - Buying gives you a whole team of people whose full-time job is that one product. Your AI-assisted build gives you… you. - Integrations, compliance, and reliability are still real work.

So the new question isn't "can we build this?" AI made the answer almost always yes. The better question is: "should we own the maintenance burden of this forever?"

My rule of thumb: build what's core to your differentiation, buy what's undifferentiated but necessary. AI lowered the cost of building, it didn't lower the cost of owning.

What's your current build-vs-buy line? Curious whether AI has moved it for you.