Building vs. Buying In-App Chat

Building vs. Buying In-App Chat: The Ultimate Guide to Weighing Cost, Risk, & Other Product Roadmap Decisions

The choice between in-house chat development and today’s vendor solutions is highly consequential. The following considerations belong at the core of any feasibility analysis, cost approximation, or product roadmap.

Here are the high-level build vs. buy factors every product team should examine: 

• Evaluate Your App’s Goals, Priorities, & Core Value Prop 
• Weigh Dev Team Opportunity Cost 
• Compare Costs: Estimating the Financial Investment to Build or Buy Chat 
• Cost to Develop Chat Functionality In House 
• Calculating Initial Chat Development Cost 
• Calculating Maintenance, Improvement, & Scaling Costs 
• Estimate the Cost to Buy an In-App Chat Solution 
• In-App Chat as a Capital vs. Operational Expenditure 
• Evaluate Time to Market & Time to Value 
• Competitive Advantage & Time to Market 
• Select Critical Chat Features: Best-of-Breed vs. MVP 
• Core In-App Chat Features for an MVP Offering 
• Advanced Chat Features 
• Real-World Example: Feature Depth & Reliability with TaskRabbit 
• Identify Risks Involved with Building vs. Buying Chat 
• Security & Compliance 
• Data & Storage Ownership 
• Decision Ownership 
• Scalability 
• Reliability & Performance 
• Technical Debt 
• Cross-Platform Development 
• Vendor Lock-In 
• Make the Final Build vs. Buy Decision
  

The decision to build or buy chat functionality can’t be made lightly. It plays a direct role in your product’s ability to delight users and solve their problems, driving engagement and retention. The decision also has significant financial implications, with an impact on budgeting and prioritization of engineering resources. It’s a decision that must be made with your organization’s unique value proposition, customer base, goals, and requirements in mind. Paired with these factors, the analysis above should help to produce an exhaustive list of pros and cons of building or buying in-app chat functionality, supporting a carefully informed decision. 

For many organizations, the advantages gained in up-front cost, total cost, time to market, and feature depth will make a chat API or SDK solution the logical choice. Still, for others with enough cash and development resources available or with a completely revolutionary vision for how chat looks and functions, in-house development may be worth the investment.

Reference: https://getstream.io/blog/build-vs-buy-chat/