As programmers I think its hard to understand why others buy what we would sometimes build. But you all deeply underestimate yourselves! I'm also guilty of this

As programmers I think its hard to understand why others buy what we would sometimes build. But you all deeply underestimate yourselves! I'm also guilty of this as well. It is expensive to a business to do all those steps, to say nothing about the expertise to know what steps to take! For early-stage companies it makes sense to offload these tasks to tools, but as your company grows the cost-calculus shifts in favor of bringing the expertise in-house. To take several numbers and examples from other threads, if you simply train on a technology for a week (40 hours) at $50/hour (@ $100,000 TC), that's $2000 for that week. Compare and contrast to some of the services ($1,200/year, $10K/year for SAML, etc) and you can begin to see the order(s) of magnitude difference between these "expensive" tools compared to a relatively "inexpensive" developer. From a business perspective, it can be a better ROI to have your developers work on products and buy the Operations.