One of the most common questions for any 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
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.
Some of you may feel that this is an area of differentiation, and you may feel that this will be cool and you are innovating. The truth is far from that and you can offer much more value by focusing on your application, much more quickly at a fraction of a price than forever taking on an additional overhead for your business to build and operate your control plane.
Before diving deep into this further, let's first align that building control planes is nothing short of building operating systems. In-fact, control planes are operating system of your software distribution channels: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/152
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
If you want to know more about the complexities of control planes, read this blog newer version here and older version here . Note that Control Planes will continue to get more complex with new requirements, use-cases, technology advancements, customer expectations.
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 at AWS in 2008, spending decades mastering its complexities. We've designed and built dozens of cloud services across different organizations like AWS, Azure, Confluent, 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.
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, only to later build control planes because their homegrown solutions is incapable of handling the complexity.
As you onboard each customers, you have to keep track of the customer, their pricing, their operations context, what version of the software they are running, where are running, their margins, their custom configuration, etc. For the first-few customers, you may be able to handle it with some internal tooling but it will very quickly go out of hands and will become the primary bottleneck for you to not only scale but also reach out to new customer segments and experiment. Moreover, having a proper control plane will allow you to quickly discover the right distribution channels for your application.
Why building your own Control Plane is NOT a differentiation?
Now, that we have hopefully established that building Control Planes is hard. If you still don't believe it, ask any company who has built it successfully at scale. Each and everyone of them have 100s of engineers solely working on Control Plane as opposed to their core innovation.
Coming back to the question of differentiation, I have covered my thoughts in detail here: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/60. Here is the gist:
Speed: Not only will your competitors be years ahead but they will have significantly more resources to focus on application and innovate faster. It’s like saying that I want to build my own operating system for distribution channels because we can do a better job than experts with decades of experience, catch up with everyone in this space in addition to the innovating on the core software with extremely limited resources, delay monetizing our innovation by years by risking the entire business and forever carry the baggage of building, innovating, and operating this operating system (for software distribution) in the market.
Cost: The sad part is that it may almost cost your business as other competitors are moving to more matured Control Plane platforms. Why? - Omnistrate has already proven that it's possible to build general-purpose control planes and have proven them in production at-scale with a wide variety of use-cases. Like Code CoPilot is real, Control Planes (aka CoPilot for Platform teams) is real i.e. organizations who are going to spend several 100s of engineers and years to implement on this are doomed to fail. How will these organizations compete with their competitors leveraging systems like Omnistrate with <10 people? -- that's 100x slower to market and 10x more expensive!!
10X better: Moreover, custom-build Control Planes will be years behind compared to start-of-the-art systems like Omnistrate to build Control Planes. By leveraging Omnistrate, not only will you accelerate the current journey by 100x but also have the future proofing to stay ahead of the market by leveraging Omnistrate (state of the art Control Plane Developer Platform) to extend their current Control Plane.
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 operations.
3️⃣ Innovation, On Autopilot – Stay ahead with continuous updates and cutting-edge control plane capabilities, without the need for constant in-house development and maintenance.
4️⃣ Low Risk – Experiment quickly and safely with different pricing, deployment, and infrastructure models, allowing you to validate what works before committing.
If you would like to discuss further on how to augment your current stack to unlock new distribution channels or optimize your existing distribute channels, check this out: https://blog.omnistrate.com/posts/151 or reach out to us at: https://calendly.com/omnistrate
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