Vibe Coding Reignites the ‘Build vs. Buy’ Debate

Thanks to vibe coding, the build vs. buy debate has rekindled over the past year, with numerous headlines pronouncing “SAAS is dead.” The argument is:

AI makes coding software so easy, why wouldn’t companies build what they need instead of paying a vendor for it?

The last time this debate was had was in the 2000s. Then, plenty of companies had legacy homegrown software. Plus, anytime you hired someone from Amazon, they wanted to build everything from scratch—whether it was email service provider functionality or a content management system or a personalization engine. It was a bit of a running joke.

What wasn’t funny was how horrible virtually all homegrown software was. Everyone complained about it—how it was clunky, outdated, and literally unfixable. And they always cheered when it was finally replaced by packaged software.

‘Build vs. Buy’ Misses the Key Issue

The push to build software almost always originates from a position of wanting to reduce initial costs. Add to that the often present “our needs are unique” and “it will be a competitive advantage” thinking and you have the critical elements for best-built-here thinking. And it’s true that creating homegrown software can sometimes be less expensive and more effective than buying an off-the-shelf version—in the short term.

However, in the long term, it rarely is. That’s because while company leaders are excited to build software that’s great on day 1, they’re never excited to do all the things that are required to make it great in year 3. Or year 5.

Maintain, Govern, and Innovate vs. Buy

The second you launch your homegrown software you enter into a new phase that entails a litany of new commitments.

• Maintenance. No software is perfect, so you’ll need to fix bugs over time.
• Stability. As usage scales or spikes during peak seasons, you’ll need to ensure uptime.
• Integrations. If your homegrown software touches any other systems, those integrations will need to be maintained as those other systems are updated or replaced.
• Compliance. Depending on the system, it may be subject to government laws and regulations, both existing and new.
• Security. Threats to your homegrown platform are dynamic and evolving, requiring ongoing attention to avoid breaches and infiltration by external actors.
• Governance. Employee misuse must also be safeguarded against.
• Documentation and continuity. Because employees leave, it’s important to have sufficient documentation to enable not only maintenance, but enhancements. Often, the departure of the senior developer on a homegrown platform cripples that product going forward due to the loss of product knowledge.
• Enhancements and innovation. Needs change and opportunities present themselves, so you’ll need to invest in improvements and new functionality.
• Competitive monitoring. Watching what developers of similar software are releasing is vital to innovating and keeping up with the market, which is always producing newer, more effective, and cheaper alternatives.

That list proceeds from the items companies are the most likely to control and do to the ones they’re the least likely to. However, it’s fair to say that companies want to do as little as possible of all of those tasks.

Indeed, once the software launches, the focus of development budgets and staff shifts to the next new thing, which has its own aggressive timeline that doesn’t allow much if any bandwidth to revisit past projects.

Distraction vs. Buy

All of those post-launch activities tend to be neglected because they’re all ultimately a huge distraction from focusing on your core business, whether you’re a retailer, restaurant chain, travel and hospitality brand, financial services firm, media company, or something else.

As it’s always been, the build vs. buy debate is ultimately about focus. As much as they can, brands should dedicate their time to doing what only they can do, and buying and outsourcing the rest.

Back in the 2000s, the meteoric success of Amazon led to chants of “Every company is a technology company.” Some companies tragically misunderstood that to mean they needed to be expert technology makers instead of expert technology users.

Today’s chants of “Every company is a software company” will similarly find victims.

Where Vibe Coding Is Most Valuable

For brands tempted to spin up their own homegrown software, think narrow scope, back office, non-sensitive data, and non-mission critical.

Here are some examples to consider:

• Project-based apps. Vibe coding can be a great way to create software that serves a short-term role over the course of a few weeks or months, such as an auditing tool.
• Calculators. Return on investment, opportunity, and other bespoke calculators can be created quickly using vibe coding and the right data.
• Interactive web experiences. Personalized quizzes and interactive content for your website are strong use cases.
• Common workflows. Internally focused, frequently replicated routine activities can be coded once and run many times.

In these instances, the software is disposable, more of a short-term experiment than a long-term investment that deserves professional engineering, strong governance, security by design, and ongoing maintenance and innovation. Errors made here are quickly obvious and the risk is mitigated by people in the loop.

When to Build vs. Buy

Whenever you have the chance to buy off-the-shelf software that fulfills 90%+ of your needs, you should do it. Customizations and other add-on can fill that remaining gap, and having a vendor who’s a true partner can natively close that gap.

For software that’s mission-critical, customer-facing, or handles sensitive data, building your own is a risky and expensive last resort. With AI engines and AI agents touted today as able to “build anything,” it appears a new crop of companies will learn this lesson the hard way, just as so many did in the 2000s. That’s because the pitfalls and challenges that made homegrown software a pariah still exist in our new agentic world.

The only difference is vibe coding makes the idea of homegrown software even more seductive—easier, faster, and cheaper—while making nearly everything that’s needed post-launch even more difficult. Perhaps the only silver lining is that failures will happen much faster.