Why Engineering Teams Are Rethinking “Build vs Buy” for Internal Integration Work
When it comes to integrating internal systems, most engineering teams default to building. The logic seems sound: if you control the code, you control the outcome. Why introduce another vendor into the stack when you can wire up a few scripts or deploy a custom webhook handler?
But as systems scale and workflows grow more complex, this mindset is shifting. Engineering teams are starting to question whether “build” really means own—or if it just means support indefinitely.
The truth is that internal integration work isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a compounding operational cost. A cost that many teams and orgs are concluding they no long can afford to pay.
Why Build Was the Default
Historically, engineers opted to build integrations in-house for three main reasons:
- Speed – A quick script felt faster than researching vendors, negotiating contracts, or onboarding a platform.
- Flexibility – Off-the-shelf tools rarely fit exact needs. Writing custom logic gave teams complete control over transformations, triggers, and error handling.
- Ownership – When teams built their own workflows, they retained end-to-end control—no reliance on third-party uptime or opaque black-box behavior.
But that calculus changes over time. What starts as a quick webhook or scheduled script slowly evolves into a brittle service, maintained by a single engineer, held together by tribal knowledge and buried in a legacy repo.
And when that workflow breaks, your team isn’t debugging product code—they’re chasing down integration bugs that never should have been their responsibility in the first place.
The Hidden Costs of Building From Scratch
It’s easy to underestimate what you’re signing up for when you build your own internal integrations. Here’s what the long-term support burden often includes:
- Monitoring and observability – You’ll need to implement logs, trace execution paths, and alert on failures.
- Retry and failover logic – Especially for asynchronous jobs or systems with rate limits and timeouts.
- Authentication management – API keys, OAuth tokens, token rotation policies—especially tricky across environments.
- Change management – When upstream APIs change, schemas evolve, or business logic shifts, someone has to update and redeploy the integration.
- Documentation and knowledge transfer – If the original engineer moves on, onboarding someone new takes time—assuming the integration is even documented.
None of these tasks move your product forward. They’re invisible, ongoing maintenance costs that consume engineering velocity and increase operational risk.
When It Does Make Sense to Build
To be clear, there are still scenarios where building integrations in-house is the right choice. These typically fall into one of a few categories:
- Core IP or product-differentiating logic
If the integration is central to how your product functions—or gives you a competitive edge—it makes sense to own the code end to end. - Highly specialized internal systems
When you’re integrating with bespoke tools or proprietary infrastructure that external vendors don’t support, custom code may be your only option. - Strict security or compliance requirements
In cases where data handling regulations require full control and auditability at every step, building may offer fewer risk vectors than introducing a third-party service.
Even in these scenarios, the decision to build should come with clear boundaries: version control, observability standards, shared ownership, and a documented plan for maintenance. Otherwise, you’re still setting your team up for a future bottleneck.
When Buying or Orchestrating Becomes a Better Choice
For the vast majority of integration work—especially internal automations, back-office workflows, and cross-functional tooling—building adds more cost than value.
Instead, teams are turning to orchestration platforms like Lumino, which give you:
This doesn’t mean engineers are removed from the equation. It means they’re no longer writing glue code for every request. They’re building reusable modules, defining patterns, and setting standards—while the orchestration platform handles the execution, monitoring, and resilience.
The Shift: From Ad Hoc Scripts to Integration Strategy
The build-vs-buy question is no longer just about cost or control, it’s about capacity.
As engineering leaders are asked to do more with leaner teams, the question becomes: Where is your team’s time best spent?
If your answer is not “debugging brittle sync logic between systems,” then it may be time to rethink your approach to integration. Get in touch with us today to see how to maximize your IT dollars with intelligent integration or calculate potential systems savings with the Ariox ROI calculator.
Happy integrating!