Build or buy
Who will be able to change a pricing rule three years from now?
In both scenarios, your trade's rules end up locked somewhere nobody in your company can touch. Inside a vendor's engine, or inside the program of a developer who has left.
Let's talk — free callWhat fails when you buy
What fails when you buy
The software cannot represent the way you work. That is the most constant complaint from users of generic configurators, at the big vendors as much as anywhere else. Your mark-up rule based on thickness and bend length does not fit the frame provided. You work around it with a free-text field, and the rule goes back into Excel.
ERP integration is handled too late. That is the best documented cause of failure. It gets pushed to the end because it is thankless work, and it derails the schedule exactly when the budget is already burnt.
The salesperson goes back into Excel. If the tool is slower than what it replaces, it loses. Always. No management directive survives three weeks of a tight quarter.
The licence invoice is not the invoice. Implementation cost commonly runs two to three times the annual licence.
An order of magnitude put forward by integrators, who have an interest in saying so. Worth checking with two vendors rather than taking on trust.
And the product can stop evolving under you. Salesforce CPQ has been in end-of-sale since March 2025: existing customers keep their support and their security fixes, and Salesforce has announced no end-of-life date nor forced any migration. But the innovation is elsewhere, and one day the migration decides itself. It happens to the biggest too.
What fails in-house
What fails when you build in-house
The other reflex is to put it together yourself, with someone handy in-house. And it works at first: a convincing prototype comes out in a few days. The demo impresses. The problem does not show up there.
It shows up in the third month, when you have to change a rule written two months earlier, in a program nobody reviewed.
And it shows up on the day of departure. Whoever built the thing changes jobs. The rules are in their head and in their program. You have just replaced a dependency on Excel with a dependency on a person, with an extra layer of complexity on top.
It is not a question of talent. It is a question of safeguards: review, testing, documentation.
The third way
Three conditions, and they are not negotiable
01
Your rules are not buried in the program.
Your price lists, your compatibilities, your approval thresholds are changed on a screen made for it, not by reprogramming. Your analyst changes a material mark-up without calling anyone.
02
The solution and the data are yours.
Nothing is rented from a vendor. The day you leave, we hand you the whole software and a copy of your data. That is settled.
03
Taking it over does not depend on us.
The software is documented and tested, and relies only on open components. Any developer can pick it up. We stay available to do it, but nothing requires you to go through us.
Someone builds it for you, on a base already proven with others, under three non-negotiable conditions. The team answerable for it is named.
The three options, side by side
The honest table
| Buy off the market | Build in-house | Have it built on a base | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Getting started | Fast if your trade fits the frame. Slow if it does not. | Prototype very fast. A tool you can rely on every day, far less so. | In between. The base is done, your trade is not. |
| Who changes a pricing rule | A trained administrator, within the engine's limits. | The developer who wrote it. Nobody else. | Your analyst, in a rules editor. |
| If the vendor drops the product | Re-implementation. It has happened to the biggest. | Not applicable. | Not applicable. No vendor above you. |
| If your developer leaves | Not applicable. | The main risk, and an underestimated one. | The solution is documented, tested and picked up by a team. |
| Who owns the solution | The vendor. You rent. | You do. | You do. |
| Where your data lives | Wherever the vendor puts it. | With you. | Wherever you decide. Quebec hosting by default. |
| How you get out | An export in a format to be negotiated. | You are already out. | The whole software and a copy of all your data. |
Our limits
When it is not us, we say so
Buy off the market if your product fits a stable option catalogue, if your rules look like your industry's, and if you accept adapting your way of working slightly to the engine. It will be cheaper and faster. We can even help you choose it and get it adopted, without building it.
Build in-house if you already have a development team, and if the configurator is the heart of your product rather than a sales tool. Keep it with you, and come to us for the safeguards to put around it instead.
Talk to us if your trade fits no standard engine, you have no development team, and the quote is what wins or loses you contracts.
We can settle this in one conversation, and it is free.
And if you want to go faster: send us a real quote. In many cases, looking at it is enough to know which side you fall on.
Your quote is only ever used to build your example. Never shown to a third party, never cited as a reference without your written consent.