The build-versus-buy question flipped. The harder question is what you want to own.

. The harder question is what you want to own.

When we replaced Jira and Tempo with our own platform, the part people asked about was the timeline. Two weeks, one developer, no Jira or Tempo licences. It is the number that travels, so it is the number that gets repeated back to us.

It is also the least interesting thing about it.

The two weeks were never the hard part. Andrei put it plainly at the time: AI changed the ratio of thinking-time to typing-time, and the bottleneck moved from typing to being clear about what you actually want. Using Audra Vibe has not changed that. Each release is still driven by something a person hit that week rather than a roadmap written in advance.

What has changed is which question is difficult.

For a long time, build or buy was decided by capability. Building an internal tool was slow, expensive and risky, so you bought unless you truly could not. That calculation has inverted. In February 2026 the market repriced the category in a matter of days.

So the capability question is no longer the hard one. The question that replaced it is harder: what are you prepared to own?

Owning a tool means owning it on the Tuesday it breaks. It means someone is still accountable when the person who built it leaves. Neither is difficult. Both are permanent, and neither is on the slide that says two weeks.

There is a third cost that is easy to miss. If the tool produces numbers anyone outside the team will rely on, you now own the evidence that they are right. That is not paperwork. It is the reason we built our own evaluation tooling before we built anything that needed it.

Our answer has been narrow on purpose. We build the systems where the way we work is the point, and where a generic platform charges us to work around its assumptions. We keep buying the things where being ordinary is a feature. Nobody needs a bespoke payroll.

Miles has been having a version of this conversation with clients approaching renewals: if you could have exactly the tool you wish you had, designed around how you actually work, at a comparable or lower cost, would you want it? The answer is usually yes. What used to end the conversation was that they could not build it. That is no longer true.

Which means the conversation reaches the real question sooner. Not whether you can build it. Whether this is a thing your business should be in the business of running.

If you are looking at a renewal and want to think it through, write to hello@windmill.digital.