If you’ve ever watched your engineering org reinvent CI pipelines for the third time, duct-tape Kubernetes configs across teams, and still struggle to ship faster, you’ve already felt the pull toward an Internal Developer Platform, or IDP.
At a basic level, an IDP is a curated layer of tools, workflows, and abstractions that make developers more productive. Think self-service infrastructure, golden paths, standardized deployments, and fewer “ask DevOps” bottlenecks. The real question isn’t whether IDPs matter anymore. It’s whether you should build one yourself or buy something off the shelf.
And that decision is rarely about tooling alone. It’s about org maturity, platform thinking, and how much complexity you’re willing to own.
What practitioners and platform leaders are actually saying
We dug into recent platform engineering discussions, conference talks, and engineering blog posts from companies like Spotify, Stripe, and Airbnb to understand where the line actually gets drawn.
Manuel Pais, co-author of Team Topologies, consistently argues that most companies underestimate the ongoing cost of building platforms. He frames internal platforms as products, not projects, which means dedicated teams, roadmaps, and user research. If you are not ready for that mindset shift, building tends to stall.
Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb, has pointed out in multiple talks that teams often build platforms to solve local pain, then accidentally create a new layer of abstraction that nobody fully understands. Her underlying point is simple: complexity does not disappear, it moves.
Spotify’s platform engineering team, in their Backstage writeups, emphasizes that their internal platform only worked because they had strong alignment across teams and a clear developer experience strategy. Backstage wasn’t just a tool, it was a cultural shift toward standardization.
Put together, the signal is pretty clear. Building can be powerful, but only if you treat it like a long-term product with real ownership. Buying can accelerate you, but only if you accept opinionated constraints.
First, define what “building” and “buying” really mean
Before making a decision, it helps to strip away the buzzwords.
Building an IDP means you are assembling and maintaining:
- Developer portals (often Backstage or custom)
- CI and CD pipelines
- Infrastructure abstractions (Terraform, Pulumi layers)
- Service templates and scaffolding
- Observability and incident workflows
You own the integration glue, the UX, and the long tail of edge cases.
Buying an IDP usually means adopting a platform like Humanitec, Port, Cortex, or an opinionated PaaS. You still integrate your stack, but the control plane and developer interface are largely managed.
The key difference is not capability. It is ownership of complexity.
Why this decision matters more than it seems
On paper, both approaches can get you to “faster developer velocity.” In practice, the second-order effects are what matter.
When you build, you are creating internal leverage. Done well, it compounds. You get tighter integrations, workflows that match your org, and fewer compromises.
But you are also signing up for permanent maintenance. Every new cloud service, every compliance requirement, every edge case becomes your problem.
When you buy, you externalize that burden. You trade flexibility for speed and reliability. You get a paved road faster, but you may hit limits when your workflows become too specific.
This is similar to how topical authority works in SEO. You cannot just publish one piece of content and expect dominance. You need to cover the entire surface area and maintain it over time. Internal platforms behave the same way. The surface area expands quickly, and maintaining coherence becomes the real challenge.
The practical decision framework (used by real teams)
Instead of abstract pros and cons, here is a grounded way to decide.
1. Evaluate your platform maturity, not just team size
A 50-person engineering team with strong platform experience can successfully build. A 200-person team without platform ownership will struggle.
Ask:
- Do you have a dedicated platform team with product thinking?
- Do you run internal developer surveys or track DX metrics?
- Do you already maintain shared infrastructure successfully?
If the answer is mostly no, buying is usually the safer starting point.
2. Map your “golden paths” vs edge cases
Most IDPs succeed or fail based on how well they support common workflows.
List your top 3 developer journeys:
- Creating a new service
- Deploying to production
- Debugging incidents
If 80 percent of your workflows are standardizable, buying works well. If your workflows are deeply custom, building may be justified.
A quick reality check list:
- Highly regulated environments
- Multi-cloud with bespoke abstractions
- Custom deployment logic across products
These push you toward building.
3. Calculate the real cost of ownership (with numbers)
Here’s a simple back-of-the-envelope model.
Assume:
- 3 platform engineers at $180k each
- 20 percent time on maintenance overhead
- 1 year to reach usable maturity
That is roughly:
- $540k per year in salaries
- ~$100k equivalent in lost productivity from maintenance
So your “build” baseline is ~ $600k per year before opportunity cost.
Compare that to:
- $100k to $300k per year for a commercial platform
The delta is not trivial. The question becomes whether your customization needs justify a 2 to 5x cost multiplier.
4. Assess integration complexity, not feature lists
Most vendors will check your feature boxes. The real issue is integration friction.
You should test:
- How easily it plugs into your CI system
- How it models your infrastructure (Terraform, Kubernetes, etc.)
- How extensible is the internal developer platform
If integration feels like fighting the tool, you will end up building anyway, just in a more painful way.
5. Decide your “exit strategy” upfront
This is the step most teams skip.
If you buy:
- Can you migrate off without rewriting everything?
- Are your configurations portable?
If you build:
- Can you modularize so you can replace components later?
Think of it like backlinks in SEO. You want flexible, relevant connections that continue to add value over time, not brittle dependencies that lock you in.
When building an IDP is the right call
Building makes sense when:
- Your workflows are a competitive advantage
- You operate at a large scale (100+ engineers, multiple teams)
- You have strong platform engineering leadership
- You are willing to invest for 2 to 3 years
A good example is Spotify’s Backstage. It worked because they had scale, clear developer experience goals, and long-term investment.
Without those, building often becomes an expensive internal tool nobody loves.
When buying is the smarter move
Buying is the better choice when:
- You need a faster time to value
- Your workflows are mostly standard
- You lack a mature platform team
- You want to focus engineering effort on the product, not the infrastructure
Many mid-sized companies fall into this category. They benefit more from reducing cognitive load than from perfect customization.
A hybrid approach, most teams actually end up with
In reality, the decision is rarely binary.
Most teams:
- Buy a platform layer (developer portal, orchestration)
- Build custom abstractions on top (templates, workflows)
- Gradually replace pieces as needs evolve
This mirrors how modern engineering systems evolve in general. You start with opinionated tools, then selectively take ownership where it matters most.
FAQ
How long does it take to build an internal developer platform?
Expect 6 to 12 months for a usable version, and 2+ years for maturity. Platforms are ongoing products, not one-time builds.
Can small teams benefit from an IDP?
Yes, but they should almost always buy or use open-source foundations. Building from scratch rarely pays off at small scale.
Is Backstage considered “building” or “buying”?
It sits in the middle. You are not starting from zero, but you still own integration, maintenance, and customization.
What is the biggest failure mode?
Treating the platform as a side project. Without dedicated ownership and user feedback loops, adoption will stall.
Honest Takeaway
If you zoom out, this is less about tooling and more about organizational discipline.
Building an IDP is a commitment to becoming a platform company internally. It can unlock massive leverage, but only if you treat it like a product with real investment and accountability.
Buying, on the other hand, is an admission that speed and focus matter more than perfect control. For most teams, that is the right tradeoff early on.
The pragmatic path is simple. Start by buying, learn what your developers actually need, and only build where the constraints start to hurt.
Rashan is a seasoned technology journalist and visionary leader serving as the Editor-in-Chief of DevX.com, a leading online publication focused on software development, programming languages, and emerging technologies. With his deep expertise in the tech industry and her passion for empowering developers, Rashan has transformed DevX.com into a vibrant hub of knowledge and innovation. Reach out to Rashan at [email protected]
