Every growing engineering organization eventually faces the seemingly impossible decision between building a custom solution or buying one off the shelf. It’s a debate that often (and incorrectly) ends by choosing whichever option is less expensive. However, it’s become clear that solving the build vs. buy puzzle boils down to understanding what you want to be good at and whether your internal build is actually unique.
In a recent episode of the Braintrust podcast, Cortex CTO Ganesh Datta sat down with Tyler Davis, a software engineer at Canva. Tyler shared the story of Canva’s multi-year journey building their own IDP on Backstage, the key realizations that led them to switch to Cortex, and a practical framework for how any engineering leader should think about the build vs. buy decision.
Here's a recap of Ganesh and Tyler's discussion. To get this and future episodes of the Braintrust podcast, click here to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Where is your team’s time best spent?
Canva was deep into their journey of building a custom IDP when the team started discussing switching to an off-the-shelf option. According to Tyler, this led to roughly a hundred different discussions about the pros and cons of sunsetting the internal build. Eventually, Canva landed on the reality that its core competency is building great graphic design tools, not IDPs.
“For something like an IDP, I don't think a lot of organizations are gonna have that many bespoke needs to where they will really benefit from building something internally,” Tyler continued. “Unless you're a company like Cortex, you probably don't want to be spending your time building an IDP. That's not what your real product is.”
Tyler believes that internal tools should provide unique leverage that is specific to your business. If the end product is going to be very similar to what’s available off the shelf, the time and energy spent building it is a distraction from your actual mission.
“We could have been spending all that time doing things that we value more highly, focusing on the Canva-specific concerns that we really wanted to wrangle,” he added.
Getting very honest about whether your build is special
Nobody builds software for the sake of building software. People build software because they think they have a unique idea and approach to solving a big problem.
Tyler says this was the case at Canva, where the team had built a homegrown IDP that gave them more control and flexibility than something off the shelf. But as it went deeper into the build, Tyler says the team eventually got brutally honest with itself to determine if what they had built actually stood out.
The answer was a resounding "no."
“In the end, the product that we end up with will be very similar to the thing that we can get off the shelf,” Tyler said. “That was an eye-opening moment for us to realize that we weren't building something special.”
Tyler and Ganesh agreed that it's critical for leaders to ask themselves if a homebrew gives their team actual leverage or if it's rebuilding a solved problem. Answering this question can make the decision between building and buying more straightforward, but it also requires teams to have tough conversations about what to do with the work that's already been done on a project.
In many cases, these conversations require leaders and individual contributors alike to reframe their thinking around sunken costs.
How to reframe your thinking about sunken costs
Although making the decision to buy instead of build can take a lot of weight off your shoulders, it does mean that you're walking away from something your team has poured a lot of time and energy into. It can be demoralizing to write, debug, and ship thousands of lines of code only to deprecate it in favor of an app that someone else built.
However, Tyler urged his peers to think about the sunk cost dilemma not in terms of time "wasted."
“We built something that we used and we got value out of it while we were using it," Tyler continued. 'If I take that away, we would've been worse off [without it].”
Canva doesn't consider the time and resources spent building an internal IDP a loss. Instead, they consider it an in-depth education on what it takes to build an IDP and what teams like theirs require from one. Not only did they get valuable data from the experience, but they also became smarter buyers.
“I don't think I would've been nearly as well equipped to set up Cortex as an IDP without all that experience building on Backstage,” Tyler said.
The true cost of a new feature
For Canva, the decision to switch to something off the shelf became abundantly clear when they looked to the future.
They had a catalog, but they realized the next step was to couple that data with a desire to improve operational excellence with a product like Scorecards. They briefly considered building scorecards themselves and even developed a proof-of-concept.
“It was a lot of work,” Tyler admitted. “This wasn't a small feature that we're gonna add on. This was like a big platform-level thing. It was just going to take us a while, and then that's just another thing we have to own and maintain.”
Ultimately, the choice wasn’t just about the initial build, but about the forever cost of ownership, maintenance, and future development. By choosing to buy, they chose to focus their energy on using the tool in ways that could advance their mission instead of building it themselves.
Ready to see how Cortex can help your team focus on what matters most? Schedule a demo today.
