Every business leader grappling with digital innovation eventually confronts a fundamental question: forge proprietary technology from the ground up, or integrate an existing, ready-made B2B platform?
By Sergey Kastukevich, deputy-chief technology officer at SoftSwiss
Beyond being a technical preference it’s also a critical strategic decision, directly shaping an organisation’s agility, competitive edge, and long-term viability in a fast-paced market where regretting choices doesn’t end well.
As a technology leader, I’ve observed countless organisations grapple with this dilemma. The appeal of a bespoke solution – the promise of complete control and tailored features – is strong. However, the reality often involves complexities and long-term burdens that extend far beyond initial development.
Conversely, integrating an off-the-shelf solution can offer unparalleled speed and efficiency, but demands careful consideration of flexibility and future alignment.
Beyond the obvious: total cost of ownership and the weight of technical debt
Many businesses initially focus on the upfront costs when comparing building versus buying. For an in-house build, the initial investment in coding, design, and quality assurance can easily run into tens of millions of rands.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. The true total cost of ownership (TCO) for a custom platform includes significant, often underestimated, ongoing expenses: continuous scaling, architectural revisions, maintenance, security updates, and ensuring compliance with evolving regulations.
Crucially, in-house development frequently incurs technical debt. Quick builds, while seemingly efficient in the short term, can create long-term liabilities – messy code, outdated frameworks, or suboptimal integrations – that demand significant future resources to rectify.
This accumulated debt slows down future innovation, making it harder and more expensive to adapt to new market demands or integrate emerging technologies.
On the other hand, integrating a B2B solution typically involves lower starting costs, freeing up capital for other strategic initiatives like marketing and growth. This shifts costs from capital expenditure (capex) to operational expenditure (OPEX) through licensing fees or revenue-sharing models.
A major benefit here is offloading the burden of continuous technical debt management and compliance updates, gaining access to a complete technical stack developed and maintained by a team with deep domain-specific knowledge.
The talent equation: an SA reality
For South African companies, the talent component of the build-or-buy conundrum is particularly acute. Attracting and retaining top-tier software engineers for a dedicated in-house build is a significant challenge. Local businesses often find themselves competing for scarce, skilled professionals against global tech giants, whose resources can outmatch local salary expectations.
Building in-house demands not just hiring, but consistently retaining diverse and deep skillsets across development, security engineering, compliance, and DevOps. Instability in internal talent – high turnover or skill gaps – can cripple a complex proprietary build, leading to delays, quality issues, and increased risk.
This is where leveraging an external vendor’s expertise can become a strategic advantage. By “buying” a solution, South African businesses can tap into global talent pools that might be otherwise inaccessible, allowing their limited in-house talent to focus exclusively on truly unique, differentiating projects that are core to the company’s competitive edge. While bespoke projects can indeed attract top talent, the capacity must exist to recruit, develop, and retain them long-term.
Agility, resilience, and the composable future
The build-or-buy choice is rarely a simple binary anymore. The forward-thinking approach embraces composable architecture. This means businesses can acquire robust, industry-leading platforms for core functionalities (the ‘buy’ part) and then strategically ‘build’ custom, differentiating layers on top, connecting them seamlessly via APIs.
This hybrid model offers the speed and reliability of established solutions combined with the flexibility to create unique customer experiences or operational workflows.
This composable approach is key to digital resilience – a crucial factor in dynamic environments like South Africa. It allows for faster adaptation to market shifts, enables rapid integration of new features, and simplifies responses to external pressures or regulatory changes. The burden of maintaining every piece of the technology stack is distributed, allowing for more agile reactions.
Navigating regulatory exposure and accountability in SA
For South African businesses operating in sectors with heightened compliance demands – such as those handling sensitive financial transactions or personal data – the decision carries even greater weight.
Building complex software in-house for such environments demands meticulous attention to regulatory changes, data security protocols, and audit trails. The instability of internal talent retention, potential gaps in quality control, and unclear accountability within a purely solo build become significantly amplified risks.
In contrast, reputable B2B vendors whose entire business model revolves around providing compliant and secure platforms can offer inherent compliance management, consistent quality, and defined accountability within their service level agreements. This dramatically de-risks operations for South African businesses navigating complex local regulations, from POPIA to FICA, providing a crucial layer of peace of mind.
Scaling smart: a blueprint for South African success
Ultimately, the decision to build, buy, or adopt a hybrid model must align with a company’s unique business priorities, market realities, and long-term strategic trajectory. There is no one-size-fits-all answer.
The most sustainable and successful technology setups are those where the foundational infrastructure, whether proprietary or vendor-supplied, doesn’t divert attention from a company’s core strategic goals.
When critical layers are predictable, secure, and robust, South African businesses can channel their energy where true differentiation happens: in pioneering product innovation, optimising customer experience, and aggressively expanding their market footprint.