Build vs buy: buy the commodity, build your edge

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Buy anything your competitor can also buy. Build only the thing they choose you for. That is the entire rule. Build or buy arguments run long because applying it honestly means admitting that your favourite internal project is a worse version of something you could rent this afternoon. We build custom software for a living, so weigh the next part accordingly: most of what a company runs should not be custom, and a good share of what gets built in-house is a CRM that could have been rented for the price of a fortnight of engineering time.

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