Should you roll your own?
The honest answer, with the numbers. Written for internal champions presenting this decision to a skeptical CTO or CFO. Most teams shouldn't build. A few should.
The decision, dimension by dimension.
Four real scenarios.
Optimization IS your product
If you're a CRO platform yourself, an attribution tool, or an analytics vendor competing in this space — building is obvious.
You operate at a scale where $2M/yr of custom work is a rounding error
At 1,000+ FTE with mature internal platform teams, the cost calculus flips — especially if you have unique compliance or integration requirements.
You have idiosyncratic product architecture
Some products (games, industrial IoT, medical devices) don't fit off-the-shelf experimentation tools. Build when the fit is wrong at the domain level.
You already have the senior engineers available
If the engineers would otherwise be idle and the opportunity cost is low, building can make sense. Rare at growth-stage companies.
Four more common ones.
You're a growth team, not an infra team
The comparative advantage of a growth team is knowing the customer. Testing infrastructure is non-differentiating plumbing — outsource it.
You want the benchmark effect
Our recommendation engine gets smarter with every experiment shipped across our customer base. Your in-house version starts from zero every time.
You want testing velocity NOW
A 14-day trial vs a 9-month build. Even if your v1 is better in some dimensions, you'll have shipped 24+ tests in the time it takes you to ship the first feature.
You don't want the vendor-churn problem
If you build, you still depend on 5-8 vendor APIs (crawlers, SERPs, LLM providers, etc.). Their changes become your incidents. We absorb that churn for you.
Signs the decision is being made for the wrong reason.
- ⚑If a VP suggests building to "save money" — run the 3-year TCO with FTE costs included. The math rarely favors build.
- ⚑If a senior engineer suggests building for the resume — fine, but put it in the perf-review context, not the company ROI.
- ⚑If procurement blocks buying — negotiate the DPA, the SSO requirement, the data residency. Don't let a procurement process push you to a $500K build decision.
“Build if optimization is your product. Buy if optimization is a function you run.”
For 95% of growth teams, optimization is a function. Building is fun, but it's not the highest-leverage use of your engineering time. Run the 3-year TCO honestly, and the answer shows up.
Still want to build? Pilot us while you do.
14-day free trial. Use Optimize Pilot to ship wins today while you build your internal version. Worst case: you learn what to build.