Build or buy? Cracking the dilemma in image and video production
Build vs buy in B2B software is often framed as a cost discussion.
That framing is convenient, but misleading.
The more useful way to look at this decision is risk ownership.
When you build media editing capabilities in-house, you pull operational risk into your own team. You own availability, edge cases, maintenance, security, regressions, and the long tail of problems that never really go away. When you license infrastructure, you push a meaningful part of that risk to a vendor whose job is to absorb it.
Image and video editing are good examples because they look deceptively finite. A canvas, a few tools, export, done. Sometimes that’s true. But once usage grows, expectations rise, or the editor leaks beyond a narrow internal workflow, it stops behaving like a feature and starts behaving like infrastructure.
The initial build is usually painful. The long tail after launch is where it really starts to hurt.
This guide is not a pricing comparison. It’s a breakdown of who owns what once the editor is live.
Deciding whether to build or buy media production infrastructure for your platform is a structural decision that shapes far more than feature scope.
Both options come with trade-offs, but the meaningful difference shows up after launch. Building gives you full control, but it also makes your team responsible for reliability, scalability, and the long-term operational burden. Licensing infrastructure accelerates delivery, but more importantly, it externalizes a large portion of that risk.
The right choice depends less on what you want to ship in v1 and more on what you are willing to own in v10. Asking the right questions early helps make that ownership explicit instead of accidental.
1. What capabilities do you actually need to own?
Start by separating capabilities you must control from those you simply need to exist.
Basic requirements usually feel obvious at first: text, shapes, colors, layers, templates, or media export. But real complexity emerges as usage grows. Support for high-resolution assets, video timelines, large canvases, collaborative workflows, or branded templates tends to introduce performance constraints, edge cases, and ongoing maintenance obligations.
Integrations add another layer of ownership. API access, data flows, storage decisions, and compatibility with your existing systems all expand the surface area you are responsible for keeping stable over time.
Finally, consider branding and customization. Visual alignment is often necessary, but deep customization also increases the long-term cost of change. The more tightly coupled the editor becomes to your product, the more risk your team inherits with every update.
This question is less about listing features and more about deciding which responsibilities belong inside your product and which ones you’d rather not carry indefinitely.
2. Is this a core capability you want to own, or a dependency you want to rely on?
A media editor can be central to your product without needing to be owned by your team.
If editing capabilities define your product’s value proposition, the question isn’t whether the editor is “core.” The question is whether owning the editor itself is core to your differentiation, or whether it’s infrastructure that enables your real advantage.
Owning a core capability means committing to its reliability, evolution, and long-term support. That includes responding to bugs, scaling usage, keeping up with browser changes, and meeting rising user expectations over time.
Relying on licensed infrastructure means accepting some constraints in exchange for focus. You trade full control for reduced operational load and the ability to keep your team concentrated on the parts of the product that actually differentiate you.
Many teams don’t make this decision explicitly. They start by building something “good enough” and only realize later that they’ve inherited a long-term obligation they never intended to own.
Predis.ai is a good example of this distinction in practice. As an AI-powered marketing platform, visual editing was important, but it was not where the company wanted to concentrate long-term ownership. Their decision to buy rather than build was less about speed and more about staying focused on their core advantage.
3. What is the cost of building versus licensing (upfront and ongoing)?
Cost is usually where build vs buy discussions start. It’s also where they often become misleading.
The upfront cost of building a media editor in-house is typically substantial. Even a constrained implementation usually requires a small dedicated team for several months. Two to three mid-level engineers alone often translate into $20,000–$30,000 per month in salaries. Over a 6–9 month development cycle, that puts initial engineering costs in the $150,000–$250,000 range before launch. Adding UX design, QA, and coordination pushes total upfront investment higher.
But the more important costs appear after launch.
Once an editor is live, your team owns everything that follows: bug fixes, performance regressions, browser inconsistencies, export reliability, security updates, and ongoing feature evolution. In practice, maintenance commonly absorbs 20–30% of the original build cost per year. That translates into tens of thousands of dollars annually in continued engineering allocation, often spread invisibly across multiple teams.
These costs don’t show up as a single line item. They surface as opportunity cost: slower product velocity, delayed roadmap items, and engineers spending time maintaining infrastructure instead of building differentiated features. Over time, the editor stops behaving like a project and starts behaving like permanent operational overhead.
Licensing infrastructure changes the cost structure entirely.
Instead of absorbing six-figure upfront development risk and indefinite maintenance obligations, you exchange that for a predictable commercial commitment that is typically a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining the same capability internally. Compatibility, reliability, and long-term evolution become someone else’s full-time responsibility.
This doesn’t mean licensing is “cheap.” It means the cost is explicit, bounded, and tied to scope and criticality rather than headcount and unknown future work. The financial question shifts from “how cheaply can we build this” to “which costs do we want to carry internally over the next several years.”
Some teams can reduce initial build costs by narrowing scope or reusing existing UI components. That can work for early experiments or tightly constrained internal tools. What it doesn’t eliminate is long-term ownership. Even a simplified editor becomes a recurring liability once users depend on it.
The real comparison isn’t build cost versus license price. It’s indefinite internal ownership versus shared operational responsibility.
Some teams make this decision explicitly and early. Others arrive at it after scoping what ownership would actually mean.
"In just a few hours, I customized Polotno, picked the functions I needed, and from then on concentrated on building my business".
Sven Speer
Founder @ Coamaker
"Our only alternative would have been to implement our own cover design editor. That would have amounted to a lot of development time, a lot of maintenance, and would have missed huge features. I still remember how delighted I was when I saw the Polotno editor already supports things like templates that we would not have had time to build".
Zack Bloom
Co-founder @ Heirloom
4. Would building an in-house editor give us a unique advantage in our market?
Building an in-house editor only creates a competitive advantage if the advantage comes from owning the editor itself, not just from having editing capabilities. This distinction matters.
If your differentiation depends on highly specialized workflows, deep domain logic, or behavior that cannot realistically be delivered through licensed infrastructure, then owning the editor may be justified. In those cases, the editor is not just supporting your product — it is the product.
But if your advantage lives elsewhere — AI models, data, distribution, workflows, automation, or user experience outside the editor — then owning the editor rarely strengthens that advantage. It often distracts from it.
Owning an editor means owning its:
– Reliability and performance under real-world usage
– Evolution as user expectations rise
– Maintenance as browsers, formats, and devices change
– Long-term technical debt
Those obligations only make sense if they directly reinforce what makes your product hard to compete with. A useful test is this:
If a competitor licensed similar editing infrastructure tomorrow, would they be unable to replicate your core value?
If the answer is no, the editor is infrastructure, not differentiation.
In practice, many teams discover that what they thought would be a source of competitive advantage becomes a shared baseline across the market. The differentiation shifts upward, while the editor quietly becomes a long-term operational responsibility.
That’s why some teams choose to license editing infrastructure even when the editor is important — not because it’s unimportant, but because owning it doesn’t meaningfully increase their competitive moat.
BrandNinja is an example of this approach. Editing capabilities were necessary to deliver their product, but the team chose not to own the editor itself. That decision allowed them to launch faster and stay focused on the parts of the product that actually defined their market position.
5. What are the long-term implications of build vs buy?
The real consequences of this decision compound over time.
Short-term trade-offs are usually obvious. Long-term ones are not.
If you build in-house, you eliminate vendor dependency — but you replace it with permanent internal ownership. Your team becomes responsible for keeping the editor relevant as browsers change, formats evolve, user expectations rise, and edge cases accumulate. If maintenance slips, the editor doesn’t just stagnate — it actively degrades the product experience and accrues technical debt that is difficult to unwind later.
If you license infrastructure, you accept dependency in exchange for continuity. You rely on a vendor to maintain, evolve, and support the editor over time. The risk shifts from internal execution failure to vendor stability, roadmap alignment, and contractual guarantees.
Neither path is risk-free. The difference is where that risk lives.
A useful way to think about this is contingency planning.
If a vendor changes terms, raises prices, or sunsets a product, do you have contractual protections, migration paths, or source access?
If your internal team changes priorities, loses key engineers, or under-invests in maintenance, do you have the discipline and budget to keep the editor healthy five years from now?
Long-term success depends less on eliminating risk and more on choosing which risks you are structurally better equipped to manage.
For many teams, licensing editing infrastructure is not about convenience. It’s about avoiding accidental ownership of a system that quietly becomes critical to the product but never central to its differentiation.
Ultimately, build vs buy is not a one-time technical choice. It’s a commitment to a long-term ownership model. Making that commitment explicit is what prevents surprises later.
Peleman’s experience reflects this reality. Their challenge was not building an editor once, but doing it again and again — reliably, at scale, over time.
6. Build vs buy: Deciding the future of your design editor
At this point, the trade-offs should be clear.
Build vs buy is not a question of tooling preference or short-term cost optimization. It’s a decision about ownership.
When you build an editor in-house, you are committing to owning its reliability, evolution, and long-term maintenance. That ownership can make sense if the editor itself is central to your competitive advantage and your team is prepared to carry that responsibility for years.
When you license editing infrastructure, you are choosing to externalize part of that responsibility. You accept constraints in exchange for predictability, continuity, and focus. The editor becomes infrastructure — something your product depends on, but does not need to internally maintain in order to win.
Neither option is inherently better. Each reflects a different answer to the same question:
What do we want to be responsible for over the long term?
Teams that get this wrong usually don’t fail at launch. They fail later — when usage grows, priorities shift, and a system that was “good enough” quietly becomes critical.
Teams that get it right make the decision explicitly. They choose the ownership model that matches their strategy, not the one that feels cheapest or fastest in the moment.
That’s the real build vs buy decision.