Every founder eventually faces the build-vs-buy decision. Do you hire developers and build custom software, or do you buy existing solutions and adapt them to your needs? The obvious answer seems to be building—after all, custom software fits perfectly. But the obvious answer is usually wrong.

The Hidden Costs of Hiring

When founders calculate the cost of building in-house, they typically add up salaries and stop there. A senior developer costs £70,000 per year. Two developers, £140,000. Simple maths.

Except it's not that simple. Salaries are just the beginning.

Recruitment costs money. Job postings, recruiter fees, interview time, technical assessments. Finding a good developer takes months. Finding two who work well together takes longer. Budget at least £10,000-20,000 in direct recruitment costs, plus the opportunity cost of all that time you spent interviewing instead of running your business.

Onboarding takes time. Even experienced developers need weeks to understand your codebase, your business context, your processes. They're not productive on day one. They're barely productive in month one. Real velocity doesn't kick in until month three or four.

Management overhead is real. Developers need direction, code review, architecture decisions, conflict resolution. If you're the founder doing this, that's time you're not spending on sales, fundraising, or product strategy. If you hire a manager, that's another salary.

Infrastructure and tooling add up. Development environments, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, hosting, software licenses. These aren't optional—they're table stakes. Budget another £500-2,000 per month per developer.

Turnover kills momentum. The average developer tenure is about two years. When someone leaves, you lose institutional knowledge, momentum, and months of productivity while you recruit and onboard their replacement. And they always leave at the worst possible time.

The Real Numbers

Let's do the actual maths for a two-person development team over one year.

Salaries: £140,000. Recruitment: £15,000. Benefits and overhead: £20,000. Infrastructure and tooling: £18,000. Management time (your time, valued at something): £25,000. The total approaches £220,000 for year one, and that assumes no turnover.

For that investment, you get whatever those two developers can build in twelve months, minus ramp-up time, minus sick days, minus the inevitable periods of low productivity.

The Component Alternative

Now consider the alternative. Instead of building everything custom, you start with pre-built components. A dashboard costs £500-800. An e-commerce integration costs £800-1,500. An AI agent costs £800-2,000.

For £10,000-20,000, you can assemble a complete product from proven components. Not a prototype—a production-ready system. The kind of thing that would take an in-house team six months to build, delivered in weeks.

The components come with documentation. They come tested. They come with patterns that work because they've been used before. You're not paying for someone to figure out how authentication should work—you're paying for authentication that already works.

When In-House Makes Sense

Building in-house isn't always wrong. If your competitive advantage is technology—if you're building something genuinely novel that requires custom engineering—then you need in-house developers. If you're planning to scale to a hundred engineers, you need to start building that team eventually.

But most businesses aren't technology companies. Most businesses are companies that use technology. They don't need custom everything—they need working software that solves their specific problems.

For those businesses, the component approach is radically more efficient. You get to market faster. You spend less money. You reduce risk by building on proven foundations instead of hoping your new hires make good architectural decisions.

The Hybrid Path

The smartest approach is often hybrid. Use components for everything that isn't core to your business. Build custom only where you genuinely need differentiation.

Need a standard admin dashboard? Buy a component. Need a payment integration? Buy a component. Need a unique algorithm that's central to your product? Build it in-house.

This gives you the speed and cost advantages of components where they matter, while preserving the flexibility of custom development where it actually creates value.

Before you post that job listing, consider what you actually need. Browse our components to see what's available off the shelf, or talk to us about a custom solution that costs a fraction of an in-house team.

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b0ase.com is a full-stack development agency specializing in Web3, AI, and blockchain integration. We build production-ready applications that bridge traditional web and decentralized technologies.