SendiventvsBuildingIn-House

The build vs buy calculation

Building your own notification system sounds straightforward. Then reality hits:

• Integrate with email providers (handle bounces, complaints, rate limits)
• Add SMS (different provider, different API, different failure modes)
• Add Slack (OAuth flows, workspace management)
• Build a queue for reliable delivery
• Handle retries and failures
• Build a dashboard for your team
• Scale it all
• Keep it running

That's months of engineering work — and ongoing maintenance forever.

The hidden costs of DIY

The true cost of building in-house includes:

Engineering time: Not just initial build, but ongoing maintenance, bug fixes, and feature requests.

Opportunity cost: What else could your engineers build instead?

On-call burden: Notification infrastructure fails at 2am on weekends.

Technical debt: Your notification system becomes one more thing to maintain and migrate.

When building makes sense

Build your own if:

• Notifications are your product
• You have truly unique requirements no vendor handles
• You have engineers with nothing better to do (rare)

When buying wins

For most products, notifications are plumbing. Essential, but not differentiating. Your competitive advantage isn't in how you send emails — it's in what you're building.

Sendivent lets you ship multi-channel notifications in minutes, not months. You focus on your product; we handle the infrastructure.

The honest tradeoff

Building gives you control. Buying gives you time. For most teams, time is more valuable.

Cost comparison

A rough comparison:

Building in-house:

• 2-4 weeks minimum engineering time (conservative)
• At roughly $150k/year fully loaded engineer cost = $6k-$12k+ for initial build
• Plus ongoing maintenance, scaling, on-call

Using Sendivent:

• Free for small usage
• Scales predictably with growth
• No engineering time required

The math usually favors buying unless your scale is massive or requirements are truly unique.

What building in-house actually looks like

// Step 1: Set up email provider
import { SESClient, SendEmailCommand } from '@aws-sdk/client-ses';
const ses = new SESClient({ region: 'us-east-1' });

// Step 2: Build template system
const templates = loadTemplates();  // You build this
const rendered = handlebars.compile(templates.welcome)(userData);

// Step 3: Handle sending
await ses.send(new SendEmailCommand({
  Source: 'noreply@example.com',
  Destination: { ToAddresses: [user.email] },
  Message: { Subject: { Data: 'Welcome!' }, Body: { Html: { Data: rendered } } }
}));

// Step 4: Add SMS (different provider)
import twilio from 'twilio';
const twilioClient = twilio(accountSid, authToken);
await twilioClient.messages.create({
  body: 'Welcome to our app!',
  to: user.phone,
  from: '+1234567890'
});

// Step 5: Add Slack (another integration)
await fetch(slackWebhookUrl, {
  method: 'POST',
  body: JSON.stringify({ text: 'New signup!' })
});

// Step 6: Build queue for reliability (Redis? SQS?)
// Step 7: Handle retries and failures
// Step 8: Build dashboard for your team
// Step 9: Add bounce handling
// Step 10: Add multi-language support
// ... and maintain all of this forever

With Sendivent

await sendivent
  .event('user.welcome')
  .to({ name: 'Jane Smith', email: 'jane@acme.com', phone: '+1 555 123 4567' })
  .send();

That's the build vs buy decision in code.

Skip the infrastructure side quest. Create a free account and ship your first notification today. Build what makes your product unique—not another notification system.