What does your tech stack actually cost to build instead of buy?
Tell us what you pay for and we price all of it both ways — hours, servers and the maintenance that never stops — then tell you which tools are genuinely worth replacing and which ones you should keep paying for.
A real paid SaaS stack to start from. Add your own tools and prices to make it yours.
Build vs Use
10 tools · 8 you could actually replace · 2 not buildable at any price
Building this stack yourself never breaks even.
Replacing all of it never pays back — but 1 tool is worth building on its own at this rate. Stack decisions and tool decisions are not the same question.
$565/mo
across 8 replaceable tools
$19,555
380 hours + $555 in AI spend
$1,034/mo
$179 infra + 17.1 hrs upkeep
Never
upkeep exceeds the subscriptions
You would pay a senior developer to build this.
Maintenance is the line everyone forgets. 17.1 hours a month across this stack — patches, outages, an API that changed — costs $855/mo at your rate. That alone is more than the entire subscription bill.
Tool by tool
1 build · 0 depends · 9 keep payingBuilding the editor is the easy half. Making it pleasant enough that non-engineers actually use it is the half that decides this.
You can build the dashboard in a week. The crawl index and rank data behind it is the product, and buying that data costs more than the subscription.
Catching errors is trivial. Grouping them into one issue, applying source maps and not paging you twice at 3am is the product.
Managed Postgres with backups, pooling and point-in-time recovery costs more in raw servers than the plan does. This one loses before a single hour is counted.
Sessions, SSO, MFA and every password-reset edge case are a permanent security surface. The build is tractable; staying current with it is what costs you.
A VPS is cheaper than a platform right up until you rebuild CI, rollbacks and edge caching on top of it.
Sending is easy. Deliverability — warming IPs, DMARC alignment, staying off blocklists — is the actual product, and it decays quietly when unattended.
A privacy-friendly pageview counter really is a table and a dashboard — one of the few analytics products small enough to own.
These bundle a frontier model with hosting and a build pipeline — replacing it means replacing all three.
Not a build decision at any price — card-network agreements, PCI scope and payout rails are contracts, not code.
breakeven = (hours × rate + AI spend) ÷ (subscription − infra − upkeep × rate)Build estimates assume an experienced developer working with an AI coding assistant, building the slice of the product you actually use — not feature parity with the vendor.
Why almost everything says “keep paying”
Most build-vs-buy estimates count the build and stop there. The line that decides it is the one nobody writes down: the hours this thing takes every month, forever.
The build is the cheap part
An AI assistant genuinely does compress a two-week feature into a weekend. That moves the upfront number, which was never the number that mattered.
Upkeep never stops
One hour a month at $50/hr is $50/mo — already more than most plans cost. Two hours beats almost every subscription on the market, permanently.
Sometimes the infra alone loses
Managed Postgres or edge hosting can cost more in raw servers than the plan does. Those never break even at any hourly rate, including zero.
The rule this produces
Build the thin internal tools nobody outside your team ever sees. Buy the infrastructure your product sits on top of.
Admin panels, feature flags, uptime checks and scheduling links are small, low-upkeep and invisible to customers — they clear the bar often. Databases, auth, email deliverability and payments are where a bad month costs you the whole product.