Hi there, I'm Raffi, one of the co-founders of Lago (Billing API). I think this dilemma is amplified with specific topics like authentication, permissions or b

Hi there, I'm Raffi, one of the co-founders of Lago (Billing API). I think this dilemma is amplified with specific topics like authentication, permissions or billing. Even if you come with a home-made solution that took you a month to build, it's a month that you've not dedicated building your own product. The second reason is because they require a lot of maintenance. Building a first version is never enough, especially if you have a sales or marketing team with a lot of imagination/needs. When we built a billing engine for a fintech (Qonto, that is now an European unicorn), the home made billing system took a month or two to develop, but it became a monster: iterations every month, new features asked by non tech users, new behaviors, bugs. The team of 2 engineers working on billing ended up being a core team of 12 people. We switched from backend engineers to billing engineers (that is not particularly funny when it's not your core product). Again, it depends your needs and the complexity required by your business. Happy to discuss that deeper if needed.