The Build vs. Buy Decision Through a Strategic Lens

Technology leaders often face a tempting proposition from their engineering teams: “We could build this ourselves.” It’s a natural instinct, especially when discussing incident management systems. Your team’s confidence isn’t misplaced – they absolutely could build a basic alerting system. However, the question isn’t about capability; it’s about strategic resource allocation and long-term operational excellence.

The true cost extends far beyond initial development. Ongoing maintenance, security updates, infrastructure management, and new integrations create perpetual technical debt. These commitments continuously divert engineering resources from core business objectives.

The Hidden Operational Costs of Building In-House

The financial calculus of building an in-house incident management system often appears deceptively simple at first glance. Organizations typically focus on the initial development costs, comparing them favorably against subscription fees for enterprise solutions. However, this surface-level analysis masks a complex web of ongoing costs and strategic implications that compound over time.

The most visible cost is the sustained allocation of engineering talent – not just for initial development, but for continuous maintenance, updates, and support. These aren’t junior resources; they’re your top engineers who could otherwise be driving product innovation and market differentiation. 

This creates a significant opportunity cost that grows more expensive as your company scales. Organizations will need to fork additional human time to integrate, maintain and keep up with the industry best practices so their incident management solution doesn’t get stale. And, while engineers are busy with this, they’re losing out on the opportunity to innovate and better serve their own customers. Differentiation can disappear while teams slog through in-house tooling purgatory.

The financial burden also extends deeper into operational territory through:

• Continuous infrastructure scaling and maintenance requirements
• Regular security audits and compliance certification processes
• Integration development for an ever-expanding service ecosystem
• 24/7 support staffing and incident response readiness
• Training materials and documentation maintenance
• Security and compliance infrastructure investments
• Monitoring and observability system development
• Backup and redundancy system maintenance
• Internal feature requests

When engineering resources are already stretched thin, the impact can further manifest in delayed feature releases, slower incident response times during the development period, and reduced ability to quickly adopt emerging technologies that could provide competitive advantages.

As organizations scale, these costs don’t just add up – they multiply. Each additional 9 of reliability (going from 99.9% to 99.99% uptime for example) is 10x more costly. What starts as a seemingly cost-effective decision can evolve into a significant drain on both financial and human resources, ultimately impacting the company’s ability to innovate and compete effectively in the market.

The case for best-in-class incident management

PagerDuty has been building industry-leading incident management solutions for over 15 years. Our platform anticipates operational issues and intelligently automates resolution, so that teams can work more efficiently, build and sustain operational resilience, and deliver better customer experiences. Recent analysis from the 2025 GigaOm Radar report validates our long-standing position as a market leader, particularly noting advanced capabilities in incident response management, mobile application excellence, and built-in AIOps capabilities. This level of sophistication comes from years of real-world deployment across diverse enterprise environments. 

The most successful technology companies understand that competitive advantage comes from focusing engineering resources on core business differentiators. That’s why nearly 70% of Fortune 100 companies have made the strategic decision to rely on PagerDuty for their incident management needs. This isn’t because these companies lack the technical capability to build their own solutions – it’s because they recognize the value of focusing their engineering talent on initiatives that drive business growth.

Strategic Incident Management: Build vs Buy

Technology leaders must choose solutions that maximize efficiency and innovation. While building an in-house incident management system is possible, purchasing a proven solution often makes more strategic sense.

Your engineering team’s expertise is best invested in developing your core product and unique value proposition, not maintaining auxiliary systems. Leveraging existing incident management solutions lets you focus resources on what truly differentiates your business in the market.

If you’re looking for comprehensive incident management with a proven industry leader – PagerDuty is trusted by nearly 70% of the Fortune 100 to handle their most urgent, time-critical operations work. Start a free trial today.