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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

> I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money

This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.

I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a million emails to break even. How many of this kind of transactional email do you send per year?

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It's a crazy calculation. For mass marketing it'd be outrageous. But for mission-critical business flows? It's a rounding error.

Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.

Let's say there's a need to approve 10 things a week, each needing a 5 person approvals.

That's $2 per month of cost.

A developer costs $150k a year, and if it takes a month to develop, you could have the service for some 5000 months.

In-house developers should focus on the business domain, not on custom building business processes.

No one does this “approve 10 things a week with a 5 person approval” flow that isn’t already done in some organized platform or system. Where on earth is this use case happening that this is both a valid use case and a savvy enough customer to buy this solution? This is not a thing.

Go talk to your vendor management team about getting a $2/mo contract signed. What does support look like because if this goes down at 2 AM, business is impacted.

Legal needs to review because it is sending employee PII (emails, phone numbers, etc) to a third party, who now knows the individuals in critical "approval roles".

Next hit up security and have them do an audit since this is going to be part of a security control. For bonus points, the internal pentest team finds a bypass that ApproveAPI needs to fix.

Your $150k a year developer is now spending 3-5 hours a week for 3 weeks shepherding a vendor onboarding for something they could have built and tested in a few hours.

Yes but your internal developer still needs to go through legal and security for the same reasons, as well as the internal pen test. The only thing you get to skip is vendor management.

And in most cases, vendor management isn't going to get involved for something that will be expensed on a credit card for $2/mo

Anywhere that dysfunctional is probably going to take 3 months and internally bill you a small fortune for the infrastructure to host the app.

Once had an internal infrastructure team estimate £70K for the infrastructure to host a single static HTML page.... :-)

This will not be built in house at a fraction of the cost. In fact, it will be a massive, _massive_ waste of time.

But it is part of a business critical flow, and therefore handing it over to a third party is absolutely unthinkable.

> This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.

I constantly see people not even considering what it means to be giving (potentially critical) business processes away to another company, not having any real knowledge in house, and not realizing that sometimes partners suck and won't help you fix problems in their software.

Neither is a sure bet all of the time, but just dismissing pulling things in house neglects a lot of other downsides to outsourcing.

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