Build vs Buy: Should You Build Your Own Cloud Cost Management Tool?

This article is the second part of our blog series on DIY cloud cost management, monitoring, and optimization tools.

In the first post, we explored how companies like Lyft, Netflix, Segment, Expedia, and Slack built their own internal cloud cost platforms. If you missed it, you can read it here.

One of the most common questions engineering and DevOps teams face is simple but critical.

Should we build this ourselves, or should we buy a tool?

In the world of cloud cost monitoring and optimization, this decision is rarely straightforward. You can choose to build a system entirely from scratch. You can extend free tools like AWS Cost Explorer with custom dashboards and scripts. Or you can invest in a specialized SaaS platform.

Each option comes with tradeoffs. To help you make the right decision, we break down why companies build their own tools and the key questions you should ask before choosing a DIY approach.

Why Some Companies Build Their Own Cloud Cost Tools

There are many reasons engineering teams decide to build internal cloud cost tooling. One common pattern we see, especially among cloud-native and highly technical organizations, is frustration with existing tools.

Several early cloud cost optimization products were acquired by larger companies. Over time, innovation slowed. Many of these tools were designed for an earlier era of cloud computing when optimization focused primarily on reserved instances and basic rightsizing.

Modern cloud environments look very different.

Today’s teams rely heavily on Kubernetes, serverless services, managed data platforms, and highly dynamic architectures. Cost optimization is no longer just about discounts. It is about designing systems where cost scales efficiently with usage and revenue.

At the same time, many advanced cloud-native companies run primarily on a single cloud provider and prefer best-of-breed services rather than broad, generic platforms.

For companies like Netflix and Lyft, cloud costs are tightly linked to business performance. They need to understand unit economics, cost per customer, and cost per product feature. When they could not find tools that met these needs at the time, they chose to build their own.

These companies also have access to some of the best and most expensive engineers in the industry, making large internal investments more feasible.

The key question is not whether building is possible. It is whether it makes sense for your organization.

Question 1: How Many Engineers and Hours Will This Require, and What Will It Cost?

Engineering time is expensive and increasingly scarce.

Companies like Netflix and Lyft dedicate entire teams of five to ten engineers to build and maintain their cloud cost platforms. This includes backend systems, data pipelines, dashboards, alerting, and ongoing support for new services.

Before committing to a DIY solution, estimate how many engineers you would need and how long they would be dedicated to this effort. Then multiply that by their fully loaded annual cost.

This gives you the direct financial cost.

Just as important is the opportunity cost. Every engineer working on internal cost tooling is not working on customer-facing features, performance improvements, or new revenue opportunities.

For most companies, this tradeoff is far more expensive than it appears on paper.

Question 2: Is Cloud Cost Tooling a Strategic Part of Your Business?

The next question is whether building a cloud cost management system directly differentiates your product or creates value for your customers.

This is not just an engineering decision. It is a product and business decision.

If your core value is streaming media, payments, logistics, or SaaS workflows, does internal cost tooling truly belong at the top of your roadmap?

Research from DevOps experts Nicole Forsgren, Gene Kim, and Jez Humble highlights this clearly. In their book Accelerate, they show that high-performing organizations focus internal engineering efforts on strategic capabilities. Non-strategic software is often better acquired through software-as-a-service.

Building and maintaining complex internal platforms that do not directly differentiate your business can slow teams down and dilute focus.

Question 3: Are You Better Positioned Than a Dedicated Cost Intelligence Company?

There are companies whose entire mission is to solve cloud cost problems.

Opslyft is one of them.

Modern cloud environments span more than 175 AWS services, along with Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, Snowflake, Databricks, and many other platforms. Each service introduces unique billing models, edge cases, and optimization challenges.

Dedicated cloud cost intelligence platforms invest full-time engineering and product teams into understanding these systems deeply. They continuously adapt to new services, pricing models, and architectural patterns.

If you choose the DIY path, you are committing to do the same.

That means dedicating engineers not just to build an initial version, but to maintain, extend, and evolve it indefinitely.

You should ask yourself honestly whether this is the best use of your engineering talent.

When Buying Makes More Sense

For most organizations, the goal is not to build cost tooling. The goal is to understand cloud costs, control spend, and improve unit economics.

Opslyft is designed to help engineering, finance, and product teams connect cloud spending directly to business outcomes. It provides deep visibility into where, how, and why costs change without relying on heavy manual tagging.

By using a specialized platform, teams can benefit from years of domain expertise, continuous innovation, and proven best practices, without diverting internal resources away from core product development.

Conclusion

Building your own cloud cost management tool can make sense for a very small group of companies with exceptional engineering resources and highly specialized needs.

For most organizations, however, the hidden costs, opportunity costs, and long-term maintenance burden make DIY solutions risky and expensive.

Before you decide to build, carefully evaluate the true cost, strategic value, and long-term commitment required. In many cases, buying a modern cloud cost intelligence platform like Opslyft allows teams to move faster, gain deeper insights, and focus on what matters most: building great products and growing the business.