In today’s fast-moving marketing world, teams are expected to launch faster, personalize smarter, and prove impact—often with fewer people and tighter timelines. This pressure leads to a familiar question:
Should you build your own customer engagement platform or invest in a proven solution like Braze?
The answer? It depends. The right decision comes down to your company’s goals, resources, and constraints. Below, we break down when building might make sense, when buying is the smarter play, and how a composable approach is changing the game entirely.
For some companies, building a custom solution is the right choice—but only under specific conditions:
Benefits of Building:
But There Are Tradeoffs:
For most marketing teams, buying a platform like Braze is the faster, safer, and more scalable path. These tools are purpose-built to help you move quickly and stay competitive—without drowning in tech debt.
Why Buying Wins:
Potential Downsides:
Initial build costs are only part of the story — yet, they're often the most highly-considered factor when companies are comparing it against initial pricing from vendors. But, the reality is that when you zoom out over 3 years, building typically costs far more due to ongoing maintenance, audits, refactoring, and opportunity cost.
Meanwhile, buying can reduce your total costs by up to 50%, especially when factoring in:
IRL example: One enterprise client saved $15M over three years by choosing Braze over a homegrown solution — while launching faster and keeping engineering focused on core innovation.
Ten years ago, this was a conversation about legacy marketing suites—rigid, monolithic platforms like Salesforce. Building felt like the only way to avoid bloated, slow-moving tech.
But today, composable architecture has changed everything.
Instead of committing to one giant platform or building everything yourself, you can create a modular stack — buying best-in-class tools like Braze for core needs, and building only what’s truly unique.
Why Composable Wins:
Why Legacy Suites Struggle:
A global fintech brand saved $15M when migrating to Braze from their home-grown platform. While they had initially built their own platform to maintain control, they ended up switching to Braze as part of their broader composable setup. They initially started evaluating Braze when they realized the ongoing maintenance to their homegrown solution had become too costly — and the solution was quickly becoming outdated with frequent need for "bandaids." This was slowing down campaigns and making it harder to scale operations as the team grew given the specialized talent needed to work within the platform. Not only did switching to Braze save them $15M, it has accelerated launch times and allows them to maintain compliance at scale.
A global D2C delivery brand had outgrown their previous ESP, and was evaluating building their own platform that could work at the scale they needed it to. Think: deploys billions of hyper-personalized messages across channels per day. As they evaluated platforms, Braze was the only platform that had the proven ability to achieve their scale — and they realized that allocating their engineering resources would affect bandwidth to work towards broader business and product goals. After calculating longer-term cost of ownership, they decided to pursue a global migration to Braze — saving them over $5M in product cost over 3 years, and enabled them to continue business as usual while continuing to scale their global operations.
This is no longer a binary decision. The smartest teams take a hybrid approach—buying best-in-class platforms like Braze where it speeds time-to-value, and building only where it gives a strategic edge.
You should consider building if:
You should consider buying if:
Composable architecture makes this hybrid possible—and it’s helping marketing teams drive more value, faster, with less risk.
