One of the most common questions for a developer-focused product is whether to build or buy. At first glance, building in-house seems to offer full control and customization, at the cost of significant time, resources, and ongoing maintenance—often diverting engineers from core product innovation.

Build vs. Buy Illusion: Chasing Control at the Cost of Speed

However, organizations often overvalue perceived control and customization, assuming an in-house solution will be more flexible. In reality, a lack of deep control plane expertise and sufficient resources often leads to poor design choices, rigid architectures that restrict customization, and incomplete features that ultimately limits practical control over the system.

Many companies fall into the herd mentality when it comes to Build vs. Buy, not realizing that the world is constantly evolving—and they must evolve with it. There was a time when observability, authentication, and even networking were built in-house, but today, these are almost universally adopted as off-the-shelf solutions. No one thinks about reinventing them from scratch. If we go further back, the same pattern holds for operating systems and databases—once custom-built, now standardized. The real question isn’t "Can we build this?" but "Should we?", especially when innovation lies in differentiation, not in re-engineering undifferentiated infrastructure.

The Hidden Cost of Building a Control Plane: Expertise, Scale, and Time

Developing a control plane in-house is like building a Cloud Operating System and is a massive, multi-year effort with no guarantee of success

Through our years of experience, we’ve seen firsthand how startups struggle when it comes to building a control plane. Many companies underestimate the engineering complexity, costs, and time-to-market delays involved in developing a control plane from scratch. They start building internal tools for infrastructure automation, only to later adopt control planes because their homegrown solutions became too complex to maintain.

In the past, I have covered why building your own control plane from scratch in 2025 is a losing game. If you want to know more about the complexity of control planes, read this white-paper here and newer version here.

A common starting point is to build Terraform scripts and build some machinery around it and calling it a Control Plane. Let me make it clear - it's not! I have covered in detail that Terraform is an excellent IaC tool if you want to provision your cloud infrastructure once. However, when it comes to Control Plane, building using Terraform is like building a skyscraper on sand and is like calling a "file" as your "database". For more details, see this high-level blog on why TF is NOT the right tool for building your Control Plane or see this detailed technical blog. Sooner or later, the entire cloud product and engineering will be choked and prevent the organization to grow further.

A 2022 McKinsey report found that over 70% of in-house engineering projects fail to meet initial flexibility and scalability expectations, forcing companies to reinvest in refactoring or replacing their systems within 3-5 years.

Building a robust control plane demands specialized expertise in multi-cloud environments, multi-tenancy, and orchestration. At Omnistrate, our team pioneered the concept of the control plane, spending decades mastering its complexities. We've designed and built dozens of cloud services, scaling them from inception to hundreds of millions or even billions in some cases.

For startups, assembling such a skilled team is a significant hurdle. The process of recruiting experienced cloud architects, infrastructure engineers, and security experts is both time-consuming and costly, often diverting focus from core product development and delaying time-to-market.

Why our customers chose Omnistrate Platform to build their Control Plane

Omnistrate eliminates this burden by providing a ready-made, enterprise-grade control plane. Our multi-cloud, multi-tenant-aware platform handles infrastructure orchestration, tenant isolation, security compliance, and cloud compatibility. This allows you to concentrate on building, launching, and scaling your core application without the overhead of developing and maintaining complex infrastructure.

By partnering with Omnistrate, you gain immediate access to our extensive expertise and a proven foundation for success. This strategic choice enables you to accelerate your go-to-market timeline, reduce operational costs, and focus on driving innovation and growth from day one.

Here are some of the common reasons on why Omnistrate customers uses our developer platform to build their control-plane vs building one from scratch:

1️⃣ Faster GTM – Launch new customers and expand markets without infrastructure bottlenecks.

2️⃣ Lower Costs – Reduce engineering effort and cloud expenses with automated SaaS operations.

3️⃣ Less Complexity – A control plane is the cloud’s operating system, and getting it right requires deep expertise and many years of investment. Most organizations underestimate the complexity, resulting in unmanageable codebase at scale that significantly hinders the product innovation.

4️⃣ More Control – Avoid the risk of tribal knowledge. Omnistrate provides a structured, scalable approach to managing your SaaS infrastructure, ensuring long-term continuity and resilience.

5️⃣ Innovation, On Autopilot – Stay ahead with continuous updates and cutting-edge control plane capabilities, without the need for constant in-house development and maintenance.

6️⃣ Low Risk – Experiment quickly and safely with different pricing, deployment, and infrastructure models, allowing you to validate what works before committing.

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