Buy Vs Build

Every software company, at some point, faces the same decision when launching new products, experimenting with pricing, or scaling monetization:

Do we build our own pricing and billing system, or buy a solution that does it for us?

Billing seems deceptively simple—until it isn't. The complexity piles up fast: handling usage-based metering, hybrid pricing models, invoicing, compliance with regional taxation, and integrating with the rest of your tech stack. What starts as a quick internal tool can morph into a never-ending engineering project, sucking up dev hours better spent on core product growth.

At the same time, off-the-shelf solutions come with their own tradeoffs—vendor lock-in, limited customization, and the struggle of fitting a third-party system into your workflow. So, which path is right for you?

The Build vs. Buy Debate

Building in-house gives you full control—custom features, seamless integrations, and zero dependency on external vendors. But it also means a long, expensive development cycle, ongoing maintenance, and hiring specialized engineers just to keep the system running.

On the flip side, buying a billing solution speeds up time to market and ensures you’re leveraging industry best practices—without reinventing the wheel. But it comes with costs (literally and figuratively), requiring workarounds for missing features and trusting an external provider with a critical business function.

The right choice depends on your product, business goals, and how much engineering effort you're willing to commit to billing. Here's how the two approaches stack up:

Reasons to Buy a Billing Solution

• 🚀 Time-to-Market – Deploy in weeks, not months.

• 🧠 Expertise – Vendors have deep insights from working across industries.

• 💰 Lower Maintenance Costs – No need for a dedicated billing team.

• 📈 Scalability – Battle-tested solutions that evolve with your business.

• 🔄 Adaptability – Supports multiple pricing models without custom engineering.

Challenges of Buying

• ⚙️ Limited Customization – You're stuck with the vendor's roadmap.

• 🔌 Integration Complexity – May not fit neatly into your existing tech stack.

• 📊 Data Ownership – Customer and billing data flows through a third party.

Reasons to Build In-House

• 🛠 Custom Features – Full flexibility to design billing exactly how you need.

• 🔗 Seamless Integration – No third-party dependencies or workarounds.

• 💡 Strategic Control – No waiting on vendor updates or feature releases.

Challenges of Building

• 🕒 Long Development Timeline – Can take months to launch, delaying revenue.

• 💸 High Maintenance Costs – Requires ongoing engineering investment.

• 🔄 Scaling Complexity – Requires building infrastructure to handle growth.

The Hidden Complexity of Billing

Billing isn’t just about charging customers—it ties into analytics, finance, customer experience, and growth strategy. A billing system needs to:

• Handle real-time metering for usage-based models.

• Automate invoicing, payments, and tax compliance.

• Support pricing iterations without engineering bottlenecks.

• Provide insights into revenue trends and customer behavior.

And that’s just the baseline. As companies scale, they run into edge cases—subscription proration, contract amendments, tiered usage limits, multi-currency pricing—that make even the best-engineered in-house solutions a nightmare to maintain.

The Flexprice Approach: Open-Source, Built for Developers

If you’re leaning toward building because of control, flexibility, and the ability to iterate fast—but don’t want to start from scratch—there’s another option: open-source billing infrastructure.

Flexprice gives developers the best of both worlds:

• ✅ Full control over your pricing models and billing logic.

• ⚡ Pre-built metering and invoicing APIs so you can launch quickly.

• 🔗 Self-hosted or cloud options to avoid vendor lock-in.

• 📊 Open analytics and revenue tracking with full data ownership.

We built Flexprice because we’ve been in your shoes—at AI and SaaS companies where billing was too complex for Stripe Billing but too core to the business to outsource completely. Now, you can launch pricing models in days, not months while keeping full control over your stack.

Want to see how it works? Check out our GitHub and start building today. 🚀