Build vs buy
Build it, buy it, or own it without building it alone.
Three ways to get AI over your knowledge, and what each one costs you in time, control and lock-in.
In short
Building enterprise AI in-house gives full control but underestimates permissions, evaluation and operations. Buying SaaS is fast but creates lock-in and per-seat cost. A specialist build on open-source components, as DeepVox does, combines speed with ownership: you keep the code and can run it yourself.
Three routes
Trade-offs at a glance.
| Build in-house | Buy SaaS | DeepVox build you own | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first value | Slow: hiring and learning curve | Fast | 6–10 week proof of concept |
| Control of data | Full | Vendor’s | Full |
| Code ownership | Yours | None | Yours |
| Cost model | Team salaries | Per seat or per document | Fixed scope; infrastructure at cost |
| Hard parts (permissions, evaluation, ops) | Learned the hard way | Vendor’s way | Done before, then handed over |
| Exit cost | None | Start again | Knowledge transfer |
What in-house teams underestimate
The parts that take longest.
- Carrying source permissions into retrieval correctly.
- Building an evaluation set and measuring accuracy honestly.
- Keeping knowledge current with owners and review dates.
- Licence traps in “open” components that paywall SSO, RBAC and audit.
- Operating models, voice and logs reliably at scale.
FAQ
Questions, answered.
Can our team take over after you build it?
Yes. Runbooks, training and a rehearsed exit test are contracted deliverables.
Can we co-build with your engineers?
Yes. The forward-deployed model embeds an engineer in your team with IP transferring from the first commit.
Related
How we work
Discovery to operation.
Learn more →Pricing
Staged, fixed scope.
Learn more →Glean alternative
Buy vs own, specifically.
Learn more →Start with two weeks of evidence, not a sales call.
A fixed-price discovery sprint, credited against whatever comes next. Or write to sales@deepvox.ai.