#norocketships special - Build v Buy v Rent
AI has started off the whole fucking conversation again
“Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”.
The most vocal Vibe Coders of late 2025 have ebbed away, and we find ourselves back in a level of normality where it’s perfectly clear that AI won’t change the underlying technology stack particularly quickly.
Kelly Goetsch (one of MACH’s co-founders) was full of “the end of the eCom platform” last autumn, and he’s now writing about how some core elements of the stack won’t be replaced any time soon - so it must be true :)
The same is true of most Vibe coders - they’ve changed their tune.
This has quickly become a conversation about building production software v maintaining it, where the build part is in most ways the more straightforward part. Claude is confusing everyone. I know SaaS vendors who are using Claude to write code, and clients are obviously using it too - so the worlds in some ways are colliding. In turn, this is causing pressure on pricing: “If I can build it myself why am I paying you £100k pa when we only use 50% of it anyway”… etc…
Maintenance is linked to the planned longevity of the tool - and on balance the teams opting to build are doing so because either they do not believe a SaaS product will EVER exist to do the job, or like an ERP they hate the current offerings so much that they’re prepared to go in for the long haul.
In large enterprises I’ve spoken to engineering leads who say “we’ll rent SaaS for a year while we build it”, and those systems are quite “core” I’d say - and yet we’ve got a good few members of the Commerce Futures group who are moving from homegrown to 3rd party SaaS still.
All this is true, but, when it comes to building a secure checkout, there’s a complexity that most end-users clients will not and should not tackle. Equally, why would you build an integration layer of your own when API’s change constantly and you’ll be updating it for years.
On the other hand, I remember Paul Smith having their own CMS for many years, which they ran on top of Magento until they replaced it with Storyblok.
Build will cost 20% and maintenance 80% is what we hear from the grownups - and AI doesn’t particularly help with maintenance - there are still holes which need a human eye in the source code too. Humans are still reviewing all AI code to the best of my knowledge - it’ll likely change of course, but that’s a quality conversation which goes hand in hand with Sovereignty and modeling
Anyway - round and round we go :)
Jamie