I feel like the build threshold discussed is _extremely_ optimistic?
> But does that always hold true? Let’s take the other side for a second by examining a much higher-priced SaaS product. Gemini reports that the price of a fully loaded Salesforce seat is ~$500/mo. Say you need 50 seats, that’s $25k/mo!
> For that price you could have 1.5x engineering resources (25 / 16.7) working on your clone full time. Once again, a CRM’s a reasonably complex piece of software and a rebuild wouldn’t be trivial, but no matter how you construe it, this is closer to a “build” decision, even for a smaller company. (And with Salesforce down 30% YTD, the markets seem to believe it too.)
If $25k for salesforce is too much, my view is that your first thought should be to look for a cheaper competitor, not build a thing?
Ok, you vibed your own. Great! Now you need custom integrations for everything, you can't hire out of the market, you have to re-train everyone and all new starters, you have an extra thing to HA, monitor, back up etc. People can't google for answers about it anymore. This is before we can talk about what it actually costs in terms of bikeshedding, roadmap creation, project management, product management etc etc. Plus compliance, security, your org policies and relevant regulations if you're storing personal information. Think of how many meetings it would take to get this done, the political costs, and how much it costs to get consensus in big companies.
There is also RISK. Nobody is gonna get fired for choosing SalesForce, but there are many different angles by which building an in-house solution for something considered commodity (tho an expensive one) can go horribly wrong.
The more subtle cost is _brain space_. Human engineers have context limits too; switching projects has costs, and you can't put ONE engineer on the thing and expect it to be sustainable. You need about a minimum of four people to understand anything you expect to maintain and operate long term.
Your org's capacity for engineering focus is precious and IMHO you should try really hard not to use it on non-core stuff unless you have to.
I don’t know if it will continue to seem euphemistically optimistic until after the Sun burns out or quantum solves NP.
There is a range of information quality to sort out, but frontier coding models are learning a great deal from interacting with effective developers that the models can then model their agents on.
But they’ll never YOLO. Life goes on outside us and all around us ;)