Build vs Buy
A 6-axis framework and live radar. Higher score = more reason to build.
The 6 dimensions
| Axis | High (build) | Low (buy) |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | We already have the team | Would pull seniors off core work |
| Cost | Cheaper TCO over 3 years | Vendor cheaper, especially at our scale |
| Moat | Customers pick us because of it | Commodity — nobody cares |
| Velocity | We can ship faster than any vendor covers us | Vendor is production-ready today |
| Compliance | We need full control and auditability | Vendor is already certified, we inherit it |
Moat and Velocity usually pull in opposite directions; Compliance and Cost often do too. The radar makes that tension visible at a glance.
The radar
Edit any cell or add a row — the chart updates live. Scores clamp to 0–5. Tab-local, not saved.
| Candidate | Band | Cost | Moat | Vel | Comp | Part |
|---|
What we build, what we buy
BUILD Core moat
- Triage / clinical reasoning
- Claims adjudication rules
- Care pathways orchestration
- Eligibility + party graph
- Core insurance stack (PAS)
- Member & employer UX
BUY Commodity infra
- Auth — Keycloak
- Payments — Stripe
- Workflow — Temporal
- Message bus — Redpanda
- Secrets — OpenBao
- API gateway — APISIX
- HL7 / EDI — Mirth
- Telemetry — OTel
HYBRID Buy the base, build the wrapper
- LLMs — buy the model, build prompts, evals, guardrails
- Document OCR — buy the base model, build domain extraction
- Provider data — buy the dataset, build matching and ranking
- Fraud — buy the signals, build the rules