Are you renting software you could own?
If your team uses a narrow slice of a product you rent forever, owning that slice can be cheaper than renewing it. I build the replacement once, and you own the source.
From $40,000 · fixed price build · you own the source
The question
The seat count stops being a budget conversation once the thing is yours. The question is whether owning it beats renting it, and that is arithmetic: your invoice and renewal terms against a scoped build cost. Send me the invoice and I will tell you which case you are in.
How it runs
- The arithmetic, before anything is built. Your invoice and renewal terms against a scoped build cost. If owning it does not beat renting it inside a few years, that is the finding and the engagement stops here.
- What your team actually uses. Which features carry real work, which are worked around, and which nobody has opened. The replacement is scoped to the first list, not to the vendor's feature page.
- What you would be giving up. Integrations, certifications, audit trails, and the parts of the vendor you are relying on without noticing.
- The build, fixed price. Source, tests, CI, and documentation, on the same terms as any other build here.
- Getting your data out and across. Export, migration, and a verified match against the old system before anything is switched over.
- Running it after I leave. Where it runs, who operates it, what it costs to keep, and a written handoff to the people who will own it.
Price
- Price
- From $40,000. The build is fixed price, on the same terms as any other build here.
- When it is a bad idea
- I will say so before you pay me. If the rebuild costs more than a few years of the subscription, the subscription is doing its job and you should keep paying it.
What this is not
If what you are really buying is a certification, an integration ecosystem, or a network of other people already using it, that is not a rebuild, and you will lose.
- Out of scope: negotiating with your vendor, unwinding your contract, and any promise about what your renewal would have cost.
Who does the work
Douglas Adolph. I designed and built the deployment system behind a fleet of thousands of production Kubernetes clusters at a Fortune 50 company, and took deployments to that fleet from weeks down to seconds, and I still maintain it today. Around it I have written the controllers that keep a fleet honest, the authentication path teams use to reach clusters at all, the secrets tooling, and the post-deploy verification that catches a release which reconciled cleanly and is quietly unhealthy.
The engineer who scopes your work is the engineer who does it.
Longer background, and the public code I own, at douglasadolph.com. Read the source before you talk to me.
Send me the problem
Tell me what you are trying to find out and I will tell you whether I can help, including when the answer is that you do not need me.
- What is stuck, or what you are trying to measure.
- What you have already tried, and what happened.
- Any date you are working against.
A short note beats a long form. What comes back is a reply from me rather than a scheduling link, which engagement fits or that none of them does, and for a build, a scope and a number before you owe anything.