How do you decide whether to build something yourself or use an existing tool?
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Every time I hit a small problem, I face the same choice: find a tool that already does it, or build my own quick fix. Building feels exciting, but I’m not sure it’s the smart choice.
Last month I spent a whole weekend setting up my own system to track my reading list. It worked, but a free app I’d skipped would have done 90% of it in ten minutes. I still can’t tell if the weekend was wasted or if I learned enough to make it worth it.
It made me wonder if “I’ll just build it myself” is often a way of avoiding the boring work of searching for what already exists.
How do you decide between building and using something that already exists? Has building your own ever paid off, or did you end up wishing you’d just used the existing tool?
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My rule for the app I run: buy anything where someone else's reputation or relationship does the hard part, build what makes the product mine. So subscriptions go through a purchases service, mail through a mail provider, music releases to Spotify and Apple Music through a distributor, payments on the web through Stripe. Each of those is mostly about trust with a store, an inbox provider or a label, which I cannot build in a weekend. The support panel, on the other hand, I built, because answering users well in my product's words is part of the product. For a personal reading list I would count the weekend as learning, not as a wrong decision.
My test is whether the thing is the reason a customer picks us. If it is, we build it. If it is plumbing every business needs, like email delivery, payments or scheduling, we use something that already works and spend the time on customers instead. The trap I watch for is building because searching feels boring. An hour of honest looking first is cheaper than a weekend, and if nothing fits after that hour, building is the right call.
I build when nothing I've actually used fits how I work. I tried Asana and Monday.com and neither clicked, so I built my own board tool. Same with my calendar, I used Fantastical for a long time but kept running into things it didn't do. I'm a keyboard person, so I even ended up building my own terminal and browser. Using the existing tools first is what told me exactly what to build.