"Is there a suitable 3rd-party solution that we can use? " This sounds simple but "suitable" tends to be a squishy term. Often the answer is "kinda", and you need to decide whether writing new code is less work than working around the limitations of existing solutions... Which kind of puts you back in square one.
I agree, it's not as simple as yes/no. I find that creating new software usually is not that expensive, but maintaining it is: dependencies update, new language versions, new formats, new requirements, etc. In my experience burden of maintenance is often more costly then budget for initial development. Maybe that case could empower more people to consider contributing to open/free projects.