Hi! I'm Tom Dehmer, and I run the sales engineering team here at Ironclad. I wanted to pop into this month's newsletter to talk about an attitude I've found coming up repeatedly when chatting with customers this summer: "Why buy what we can just build."
It's likely coming from experiencing the amazing capabilities of LLMs (plus maybe a bit of marketing from those same companies). And honestly, I get it. But people tend to gloss over some parts I think are vital to consider:
First, the moment you decide to build anything, you've become a software company of one. Your IT team now owns maintaining, testing, updating, and securing something that isn't core to your business, while real vendors have hundreds of engineers on that exact problem. Years later we’ll hear the same story: nobody kept it up.
Second, the CLMs which fail aren't the ones that couldn't hit exact specs, they're actually the ones nobody uses because a single change meant a months-long services engagement. So it's less about capabilities than it is the usability, maintainability, and the support team behind them.
Neither of these means build is the wrong call; of course it works out sometimes! But if you’re weighing build as an option, make sure your team considers all the aspects required to make a build truly successful. We’ve put together the questions worth asking yourself before you commit either way.
Here's what to consider →
