Build vs Buy Incident Management: 2026 Cost & Decision Framework

During a high-traffic outage, a team's custom incident script failed. The script was hosted on the same Kubernetes cluster that was failing. When production went down, so did the tool they needed to coordinate the response. They coordinated in a Google Doc because it was the only thing still working. > "You're not building a bot. You're adopting a forever-system." **Disclosure:** Runframe builds incident management software. This guide is written to be fair to both build and buy. So the question becomes: **build vs buy incident management in 2026?** If you're already feeling coordination strain, see [our guide to scaling incident management](/blog/scaling-incident-management). --- ## 60-Second Decision Path **You're under 20 people, no enterprise customers:** Start with structured Slack workflows. Buy when you hit the triggers below. **You're 20–200 people, growing fast:** Default to buy or go hybrid. Build only if you have unusual regulatory constraints or incident management is your actual product. **You're 200+ people:** You've likely outgrown simple tools. Evaluate enterprise options or specialized platforms for your scale. **What this article covers:** Incident management means detection → paging → coordination → comms → post-incident review. Not just "something that wakes people up." Prefer a quick call? Jump to the [Decision Checklist: When to Buy](#decision-checklist-when-to-buy). --- ## What You'll Learn - The real cost of building (it's not the initial build) - Why incident load tends to increase, not decrease - The reliability paradox: your tool must work when everything else breaks - A build vs buy decision framework with concrete triggers - Hybrid options teams often overlook - What to buy first (if you buy) - Build gotchas most teams forget --- ## The 2026 Context: More Code, More Incidents Before diving into build vs buy, here's the reality: **faster shipping usually means more incidents.** Some teams report that AI-assisted development increases change volume, and with it, incident load. Others also report a larger blast radius when AI-generated changes aren't reviewed with the same rigor as hand-written code. More code deployed faster means more surface area for things to break. AI hasn't changed this dynamic. It's accelerated it. So while you're evaluating whether to build or buy, the problem you're solving isn't static. It's growing. --- ## The Build Illusion: Why It Seems Cheaper Than It Is With AI coding assistants, a competent engineer can spin up a basic incident management system in days: - Slack bot that creates channels - Simple status page - Basic escalation logic - Incident history storage Seems straightforward. Here's what teams forget. ### The Hidden Cost: Dedicated Engineer Someone needs to own this. Not as a side project. As actual job responsibility. **Example (B2B SaaS, ~120 engineers):** A team assigned a senior engineer to their custom incident tool "for a quarter." Three years later, it's still a quarter of his time. Senior engineer fully-loaded (salary + benefits + overhead) is often ~$250K–$400K/year (varies by region and equity). Even at 25% allocation, that's **$62K–$100K annually** in opportunity cost. For one feature. **Sensitivity check:** If your maintainer is 0.1 FTE instead of 0.25 FTE, subtract ~$25K–$40K/year from the build cost below. But be honest as 0.1 FTE is rarely enough once the tool is in production. ### The Maintenance Tax **What usually happens:** **Months 1-3:** The engineer builds it. It works great. **Months 4-6:** Edge cases appear. Slack platform changes (permissions, rate limits, app reviews). A new hire asks "why does it work this way?" The original engineer spends increasing time on support. **Months 7-12:** The engineer who built it leaves or changes roles. Nobody else understands the code. The team is afraid to touch it. **Year 2:** The tool has technical debt. Nobody wants to work on it. But you're dependent on it. ### The Non-Obvious Cost: Policy Surface Here's what teams don't expect: **incident tooling becomes a policy surface faster than you think.** Once you have an incident system, you'll need to answer questions you didn't anticipate: - Who can declare incidents? (RBAC) - Who can approve closing them? (Approvals) - How long do we keep incident records? (Retention) - Where is incident data stored? (Data residency) - Can we export incident reports for compliance? (Audit) Every internal tool eventually becomes a policy surface: access, audit, retention. Building this is cheap initially. Maintaining it as requirements evolve is not. **Example (fintech infra team, regulated environment):** The team spent ~$80K of engineering time building an incident system. It worked for 18 months. Then Slack platform changes + internal security policy changes hit. The engineer who built it had left. They spent another ~$40K rewriting it. Six months later, compliance asked for audit trails and data residency. Another ~$30K. ### The Reliability Paradox During a P0 incident, when your database is struggling and customers are angry and your CEO is in the Slack channel, your incident tool needs to work. Flawlessly. Yet many teams host their custom incident tooling on the same infrastructure as their product. When the product goes down, the incident tool goes down with it. Your incident tool needs different infrastructure than your app. It needs higher availability. It needs separate backups. It needs its own monitoring. --- ## Build Gotchas Teams Forget **Slack permission model complexity.** Slack's permission model is nuanced and scoping access to channels without granting overly broad permissions is tricky. Bulk operations during incidents can also hit rate limits. **On-call phone/SMS reliability.** Deliverability issues, carrier filtering, international support. Vendors invest heavily in carrier routing, retries, and filtering. **Audit logs and data residency.** GDPR, SOC 2, HIPAA depending on your customers, you may need specific data storage requirements, export capabilities, and immutable logs. **The rebuild trap.** Rebuilds break because nobody remembers why policy X exists. Consequences: you either rebuild the wrong thing, or you spend weeks rediscovering context that left with the original engineer. --- ## If You Build, Build This First **Minimum viable reliability:** - Separate hosting from production (different failure domain) - Paging + escalation state machine (including acknowledgements) - Timeline capture + export (for post-incident + compliance) - Audit log of key actions (declare/assign/close) --- ## The Real Cost Comparison (20-Person Company, 3-Year TCO) Let's put numbers on this. **These are estimates and your actual costs will vary based on location, team structure, and requirements.** TL;DR (3-year cost, 20-person company): - **Build:** $246K–$413K - **Buy:** $33K–$83K Build typically costs ~4–8× more for most teams (driven by ongoing maintenance + rebuilds). **Assumptions:** - Senior engineer fully-loaded (salary + benefits + overhead): $250K–$400K/year - 1 month initial build time - 0.25 FTE ongoing maintenance - If you build paging via phone/SMS, plan for ongoing deliverability work (carriers, filtering, retries) - Separate infrastructure for reliability - Periodic rework every 18-24 months (API changes, compliance, new features) Use this as a sizing model, not a universal benchmark. These ranges are illustrative and vary by region, scope, and reliability requirements. **Build (3-year TCO):** | Cost | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | |------|--------|--------|--------|-------| | Initial build (1 mo eng time) | $21K–$33K | $0 | $0 | $21K–$33K | | Dedicated maintainer (25% time) | $62K–$100K | $62K–$100K | $62K–$100K | $186K–$300K | | Infrastructure & hosting* | $3K–$10K | $3K–$10K | $3K–$10K | $9K–$30K | | Rebuilds & migrations** | $0 | $30K–$50K | $0 | $30K–$50K | | **Total** | **$86K–$143K** | **$95K–$160K** | **$65K–$120K** | **$246K–$413K** | *Depends on HA requirements, pager/telephony, audit logging, retention, data residency. **Triggered by Slack platform changes, org restructuring, compliance requirements, new escalation policies, or new integrations. **Buy (3-year TCO example for a 20-person company):** | Cost | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | |------|--------|--------|--------|-------| | Tool subscription*** | $10K–$25K | $10K–$25K | $10K–$25K | $30K–$75K | | Onboarding & setup | $3K–$8K | $0 | $0 | $3K–$8K | | **Total** | **$13K–$33K** | **$10K–$25K** | **$10K–$25K** | **$33K–$83K** | ***Varies by seats (on-call responders vs all employees), integrations, SLA tier, status page, audit requirements. Assumes ~10-15 on-call responders (not all 20 employees). If pricing per on-call responder, costs are typically at the low end. If per-employee seat licensing, costs trend toward high end. If your vendor prices per on-call responder rather than per employee, your buy-side TCO is usually closer to the low end of the range. **Sensitivity check:** Your numbers will differ based on location, team structure, and requirements. If your maintainer is 0.1 FTE instead of 0.25 FTE, subtract ~$25K–$40K/year from build costs. If you avoid rebuilds entirely, subtract another $30K–$50K. The gap narrows but rarely closes as buy is typically 3–5× cheaper over three years for most teams. The gap is wider than most teams think. And the build model assumes nothing catastrophic happens - no major rewrites, no security incidents, no key engineer departures. See [our research on scaling incident management](/blog/scaling-incident-management) for how coordination costs compound as teams grow. --- ## Hybrid Options (Often the Right Answer) It's not purely build vs buy. There are middle paths: **Buy the core, build the edges.** Use a commercial tool for the incident workflow (alerting, escalation, timeline), but build custom integrations, internal scoring, or specialized reporting yourself. You get 80% of the value with 20% of the maintenance. **Open source with discipline.** Self-host an open-source solution, but treat it like a vendor: dedicate an owner, budget regular upgrades, and pay for hosted management if available. You're not paying licensing, but you're still paying in engineering time. **Start lightweight, graduate.** Use a structured Slack workflow until you hit clear triggers (see checklist below), then adopt a tool. Don't prematurely optimize, and don't wait until you're drowning. --- ## The Build vs Buy Decision Framework Here's a simple framework. Answer these questions honestly: ### Is incident management core to your business? **Build when:** You're building an incident management product (competitor, not customer). **Buy when:** Incident management is operational, not strategic. You're not going to win your market because you have a slightly better incident bot. ### Do you have someone to own this long-term? **Build when:** You have a dedicated engineer with explicit time allocation and a succession plan. **Buy when:** "We'll figure it out" or "Someone will pick it up." ### Can you afford for it to break during a P0? **Build when:** You've architected it on separate infrastructure with higher availability than your main app. **Buy when:** Your incident tool shares infrastructure with your product (this is what most teams do, and it's wrong). ### What happens when the builder leaves? **Build when:** The code is well-documented, tested, and multiple people understand it. **Buy when:** It's "one person's project" and nobody else has touched it. ### What's your opportunity cost? **Build when:** Engineering time is genuinely cheap and you have nothing more valuable to work on. **Buy when:** Your engineers could be working on product features that directly impact revenue. --- ## Decision Checklist: When to Buy Triggers that suggest you're ready for a dedicated incident management platform: - [ ] On-call rotation involves ≥8 people: see our [on-call rotation guide](/blog/on-call-rotation-guide) for setup patterns - [ ] You're handling ≥4 incidents per month - [ ] ≥3 teams are regularly involved in incident response: see our [incident response playbook](/blog/incident-response-playbook) for coordination patterns - [ ] You have customer-facing SLAs or enterprise customers asking about incident processes - [ ] Compliance requirements exist (audit logs, retention, RBAC) - [ ] You need stakeholder updates within 10-15 minutes, reliably - [ ] Your current ad-hoc system failed during a real incident If 3+ apply, you're in buy territory. --- ## When Building Makes Sense There are legitimate reasons to build: **Highly unique requirements.** Not "we want it to look a certain way." Regulatory constraints, unique workflows no generic tool supports, or deep integration with proprietary systems. **Massive scale.** If you're 500+ engineers with complex multi-team incident processes, off-the-shelf tools may not fit. But at that scale, you have a team dedicated to this. **Learning.** Sometimes building is educational. Just be honest that it's a learning project, not a production system, and budget for the rewrite. ### Example where building can win (illustrative) This is a composite example, not a single identifiable company. **80-person fintech, heavy compliance requirements:** **Why they built:** - Required EU data residency for EU customers (specific region, specific provider) - Custom approval workflows for production access (proprietary fraud detection) - Audit log format mandated by regulators (not standard JSON) - Integration with internal systems no vendor supported **Three years later:** - Still maintained by 0.3 FTE SRE - Total cost ~$280K over 3 years (vs ~$250K if they'd bought + built all custom integrations) - **They'd build again** because their requirements stayed unique **The difference:** Their "unique requirements" were regulatory constraints, not preferences. Most teams think they're unique. Few actually are. --- ## When Buying Makes Sense For most teams 20-200 people, the answer is buy. Here's why: **Ongoing innovation.** Your custom tool doesn't evolve. Paid tools ship new features based on what hundreds of teams need. **You don't own the maintenance.** Slack platform changes? Vendors usually ship updates faster. Security patches and upgrades are typically handled for you. **You can leave.** Built a custom tool and hate it? You're stuck. Bought a tool and hate it? You switch. **Better reliability.** Dedicated incident management vendors have higher uptime requirements than typical startups. Their whole business is being available when you need them. > "Buying isn't outsourcing responsibility. It's outsourcing maintenance." --- ## What to Buy First (If You Buy) If you decide to buy, don't boil the ocean. Start with the core: **Tier 1 (must-have):** - Paging/escalation with reliable phone/SMS - Timeline capture (what happened, when) - Comms templates (stakeholder notifications): see our [incident stakeholder communication templates](/blog/incident-stakeholder-communication-templates) **Tier 2 (add within 6 months):** - Status page (public or internal) - Basic analytics (MTTR, incident frequency) - Post-incident review workflow **Tier 3 (nice-to-have):** - Advanced reporting and dashboards - Custom integrations and webhooks - SLA/SLO tracking --- ## AI Doesn't Change the Maintenance Math AI can speed up the initial build. It doesn't remove the hard parts of incident tooling: reliability under failure, policy/audit requirements, and ownership when the original builder leaves. If you build, budget for ongoing work (Slack/API changes, deliverability, compliance asks) and make sure more than one person can operate and modify the system during a P0. --- ## Sample Business Case (Copy-Paste for Leadership) **Current state:** - Custom Slack bot maintained by 1 senior engineer (0.25 FTE) - Annual cost: ~$65K–$100K (opportunity cost) - Risk: Bus factor = 1, shares production infrastructure **Proposed:** - Commercial incident management platform - Annual cost: ~$10K–$25K (depending on seats + tier) - Migration: 2–4 weeks, low risk **Financial impact:** - **Save:** $40K–$75K/year in engineering time - **Redeploy:** 0.25 FTE to [specific product initiative] - **Reduce risk:** Eliminate single point of failure - **Scale:** Works at 2x team size with no additional engineering **ROI:** 3–5x in year 1, increases in years 2–3 **Recommendation:** Buy. Free up senior engineer for [product work that drives revenue]. --- ## Migration Reality Check: What Actually Breaks If you're migrating from a custom build to a commercial tool, three things break: 1. **Incident ID schemes don't map cleanly.** Your custom tool used `INC-2024-001`. The new tool uses `#1234`. Cross-references in Jira, docs, and Slack break. 2. **Team habits reset.** Muscle memory around commands, templates, workflows must be retrained. The first 2-4 weeks feel slower, not faster. 3. **Historical metrics become discontinuous.** Year-over-year MTTR comparisons get messy when you switched tools mid-year. These aren't dealbreakers. But they're real friction. Budget 2-4 weeks for migration and expect productivity dip during transition. --- ## The Bottom Line In 2026, building is easier than ever. That's the trap. The real question isn't "can we build this?" It's "should we maintain this forever?" - **Building** makes sense if incident management is core to your business, you have dedicated ownership, and you've architected for reliability. - **Buying** makes sense for most teams 20-200 people who want something that works, doesn't become a long-term maintenance burden, and lets engineers focus on product. - **Hybrid approaches** often hit the sweet spot: buy the core workflow, build the edges. Incident management is a strategic investment, not a cost center. Choose accordingly. --- **Want the next step?** Read [our research on what teams actually struggle with when scaling incident management](/blog/scaling-incident-management). --- ## Build vs Buy FAQs **Should we build incident management in-house?** Build in-house only if you have: (1) a dedicated owner with explicit time allocation, (2) separate infrastructure from your product, (3) unusual regulatory or workflow requirements that off-the-shelf tools can't meet. For most teams 20-200 people, the total cost of ownership is lower when buying. **What's the real cost to maintain an internal incident tool?** Assuming a 0.25 FTE senior engineer at $250K–$400K fully-loaded, expect $62K–$100K/year in maintenance costs alone. Add infrastructure ($3K–$10K/year) and periodic rebuilds every 18-24 months ($30K–$50K each). Over three years, most teams spend $245K–$420K total vs. $33K–$83K for a commercial tool. **When should a startup buy incident management instead of building?** Buy when you hit 3+ of these triggers: on-call rotation ≥8 people, ≥4 incidents/month, ≥3 teams involved in incidents, customer-facing SLAs, compliance requirements, or your ad-hoc system failed during a real incident. See the decision checklist in this article. **How much does it cost to build an incident management system?** Assuming $20K–$40K for initial build plus $60K–$100K/year in ongoing maintenance. Over three years, that's $200K–$350K depending on fully-loaded costs and rebuild frequency. Commercial tools for a small team typically run ~$10K–$25K/year depending on seats and capabilities. --- ## Evaluating Incident Management Tools? If you're a 20–100 person engineering organization, Runframe is building a Slack-first incident management platform designed for simplicity over enterprise complexity. [Join the waitlist for early access](/contact) --- <script type="application/ld+json"> { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "FAQPage", "mainEntity": [ { "@type": "Question", "name": "Should we build incident management in-house?", "acceptedAnswer": { "@type": "Answer", "text": "Build in-house only if you have: (1) a dedicated owner with explicit time allocation, (2) separate infrastructure from your product, (3) unusual regulatory or workflow requirements that off-the-shelf tools can't meet. 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