Every connected-product company faces this decision. The honest answer isn't “always buy” — it's knowing the three things that actually decide it: scalability, flexibility, and total cost of ownership.
When you add connectivity to a product, you inherit a back office you didn't plan for: billing every subscriber, taking payment, handling failed cards, reconciling carrier usage, staying tax-compliant, letting customers self-serve. Someone has to run it. The question is whether you build that system or buy it.
It's tempting to build. You have engineers. The estimate looks reasonable. And “we'll just add billing” sounds simple. But as our CTO put it years ago — and the data has only proven him right — given enough time and money, anything can be built. The question is whether it'll be up for the job.
Every build-vs-buy call comes down to the same three factors — and they're exactly where internally built systems most often fall short.
The system that works for your first 1,000 subscribers is not the system that works for 100,000. Commercial platforms are built and measured against that curve. Internal builds rarely are — until they choke at the worst possible time.
Your pricing will change. New carriers, new markets, new models — usage, per-transaction, bundles, downstream. Each change is a feature request against your build, and a config change on a mature platform.
The one that surprises people. The build estimate is the smallest number you'll ever see on this project — the rest arrives over the next five to seven years.
Here's the analogy from our founder, and it still holds: of course you can build a $200,000 Ford truck — but why would you, when you can buy one for $40,000? The current data backs it up, and hard.
Total cost of ownership is where both build and buy get underestimated — usually by a factor of two to three, and by three to five over a full five-year lifecycle. A one-year comparison always flatters the cheaper-looking option; the costs that weren't modeled show up in years two through seven.
Sources: Zylo (2026); Gartner / TechTarget TCO analysis (2026). Figures describe general custom-software builds.
And the maintenance bill is the part almost everyone forgets. Industry models put ongoing maintenance at roughly 15–20% of the build cost every year, with the majority of a system's lifetime cost accruing after launch, not during it.
Forrester's Total Economic Impact model estimates that most of a custom system's total cost of ownership accrues after go-live — and separately found that 60% of companies underestimate the long-term cost of maintaining custom-built software.
Source: Forrester Total Economic Impact / Forrester Research (2024), as cited in industry TCO analyses (2025–26).
And the build itself rarely goes to plan: internal builds routinely take longer than expected, cost more than anticipated, and ship with real limitations before they stabilize. That's before you count what the estimate leaves out entirely:
We're not going to tell you buying is always right — that's not honest, and you'd be right not to trust it. Building can be the correct call.
If that's you, build — with eyes open. But for most connected-product companies, billing and subscriber operations are mission-critical utilities: they must work flawlessly, but they don't differentiate you. The foundational rule holds — if the software performs a function that doesn't set you apart from competitors, lean toward buying. That's the textbook case for a commercial platform.
Buying isn't automatically safe. “Billing” gets used so broadly that many projects fail because they treat it as just invoicing — collecting money — when the value is in everything around it: automation, reconciliation, and operational scale. A non-integrated billing tool bolted onto your stack pushes the hard work — chasing failed payments, reconciling carriers, keeping systems in sync — back onto human capital, the most expensive and error-prone workflow there is.
The thing worth buying is an integrated platform where the systems do the bulk of the work and your team handles only the exceptions. That's the difference between a tool and an operation.
A build isn't a fixed target — it has to keep pace with a market that's getting more complex every year. That's the part of the estimate no one can size, because it hasn't happened yet.
Counterpoint Research projects cellular IoT connections growing to roughly 7 billion by 2032 — and MVNO connections more than doubling, growing at about twice the pace of the mobile operators. The market isn't just bigger; the operating model is shifting.
Source: Counterpoint Research, IoT Connections Report.
The analyst read on where this goes is the most important part for a build-vs-buy decision: the winners won't be defined by access to connectivity — they'll be defined by their ability to manage complexity across devices, networks, countries, and customers. In other words, the leading operators increasingly look like software and orchestration platforms, not connectivity resellers.
Every one of those trends lands on your billing and operations layer:
A commercial platform amortizes all of that across its whole customer base — the eSIM support, the new carrier integrations, the compliance updates arrive as part of the product. Build it yourself and every one of those shifts is a new project on your roadmap, competing with the product that actually differentiates you.
An internal build is made for the requirements you have today. As markets change and demand new ways to deliver and monetize services, it falls short — and that means more investment and lost opportunities. A commercial platform has years of flexibility and scale already built in.
RevX is the “buy” that behaves like a purpose-built “build.” One platform for multi-carrier connectivity, subscription and usage billing, payments, tax and compliance, and branded self-service — integrated with 150+ carriers, so the carrier work is already done. You get time-to-market and a mature operational floor without the CAPEX, the maintenance burden, or the risk of finding out at 100,000 subscribers that your build wasn't up for the job.
Start where you are, scale when you're ready.
Tell us about your business model and where you want to take it. We'll give you a straight answer on build vs. buy.