> I'd opt to build this in house rather and take on the costs associated with it and still come out saving money
This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.
I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a million emails to break even. How many of this kind of transactional email do you send per year?
Anyone that’s at a scale where this is connected to business certical workflows is likely equipped to build this in house at a fraction of the cost. In terms of level of effort, this product itself is a rounding error.
Go talk to your vendor management team about getting a $2/mo contract signed. What does support look like because if this goes down at 2 AM, business is impacted.
Legal needs to review because it is sending employee PII (emails, phone numbers, etc) to a third party, who now knows the individuals in critical "approval roles".
Next hit up security and have them do an audit since this is going to be part of a security control. For bonus points, the internal pentest team finds a bypass that ApproveAPI needs to fix.
Your $150k a year developer is now spending 3-5 hours a week for 3 weeks shepherding a vendor onboarding for something they could have built and tested in a few hours.
Yes but your internal developer still needs to go through legal and security for the same reasons, as well as the internal pen test. The only thing you get to skip is vendor management.
And in most cases, vendor management isn't going to get involved for something that will be expensed on a credit card for $2/mo
No one does this “approve 10 things a week with a 5 person approval” flow that isn’t already done in some organized platform or system. Where on earth is this use case happening that this is both a valid use case and a savvy enough customer to buy this solution? This is not a thing.
> This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.
I constantly see people not even considering what it means to be giving (potentially critical) business processes away to another company, not having any real knowledge in house, and not realizing that sometimes partners suck and won't help you fix problems in their software.
Neither is a sure bet all of the time, but just dismissing pulling things in house neglects a lot of other downsides to outsourcing.
This seems to be the default position of almost everyone in IT, everywhere I go. People make this claim without doing any calculations.
I can imagine building this in house would be at least a few weeks of developer work and some more devops. That's tens of thousands of dollars. You'd have to send a million emails to break even. How many of this kind of transactional email do you send per year?