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> 1. 10% of your time doing devops work isn't necessarily a waste - if 10% of that time is cheaper than enterprise offerings, then this is probably worth the resources, unless you are very short on talent.

That's not the right calculation for revenue-generating products (IME). The right calculation is: if your product got this 10% instead of you doing DevOps work, is the additional long-term revenue higher than the cost of the enterprise offering?

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What is the X% of your product you're willing to outsource? What % of margin are you willing to give up for that capability? Because the hope/dream of every parasitic SaaS is to grow with their customers...

Having taken part in many build-vs-buy decisions, there are no easy answers. The overriding factors in most decision relate to the specifics of the business. Some very common reason for buy decisions:

- You don't actually know if this feature will be important long term

- You have many urgent needs, the opportunity cost of waiting for "build" to finish is too high

- Your company is, for various reasons, unable to attract and retain the kind of talent who could maintain a system of this complexity (I realize this sounds like "we're not willing to pay market reates", I promise it's more complicated than that)

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