By Anushay Rashid
“Why are we still paying for this?”
It is a question coming up more often in boardrooms and budget meetings. Teams look at another SaaS renewal or another platform that almost fits the way the business works and ask: couldn’t we just build this ourselves?
A few years ago, the answer was often no. Custom software meant developers, long timelines and significant budgets. AI-assisted development has changed that. Someone with strong domain knowledge can now turn an idea into a working prototype in days, sometimes hours.
That is an important shift. But being able to build software is not the same as being ready to own it.
That is where the new build-versus-buy conversation begins.
There are good reasons to build
The case for building internally is stronger than it has been in years.
The upfront cost of testing an idea has fallen, but the bigger opportunity is relevance. The people inside a business understand its problems in ways an external vendor often cannot. A finance team knows where its invoicing process breaks. An operations manager knows which system people actually rely on, regardless of what the official process says.
AI gives the people closest to those problems a greater ability to shape, prototype, and test the software meant to solve them.
Retool’s 2026 Build vs. Buy report found that 35% of surveyed builders had already replaced functionality from at least one SaaS product with something custom-built.
Building makes particular sense when software captures knowledge unique to the company, directly improves the value it provides, or gives the business greater control over its data.
But something easy to build does not automatically make it worth owning.
Day one is no longer the expensive part
This is where vibe coding can be misleading.
AI has dramatically reduced the cost of getting to day one. It has not eliminated day 500.
Software still has to keep working. APIs change. Security vulnerabilities appear. Business processes evolve. Someone still has to test, patch, monitor and support what has been built.
A finance associate might create an invoicing application over a weekend. Six months later, dozens of people may depend on it and sensitive financial data may flow through it.
At that point, the question is no longer who built it. It is who owns it.
Security makes this even more important. Veracode’s 2025 GenAI Code Security Report found that 45% of the AI-generated code it tested had security weaknesses. For businesses handling sensitive customer, financial or health data, those weaknesses can quickly become a serious compliance and security risk.
That does not mean companies should stop building with AI. It means that once software moves from experiment to production, it needs proper IT involvement, security, governance and ownership.
Vibe coding has changed the economics of prototyping. It has not changed the economics of owning software.
Build what makes you different
The new economics of software does not mean every SaaS subscription should disappear.
If an existing platform already solves a common business problem well, rebuilding it internally may simply move the cost from a vendor into your own organization.
Before a team says, “let’s just build it,” three questions are worth asking.
Does this genuinely differentiate the business? Will it improve customer experience, capture unique knowledge or solve something existing software cannot?
Who owns it after launch? Not who can build it today, but who will maintain, secure and support it years from now.
Have we calculated the cost of ownership, or only the cost of creation? The first version might be cheap. The software lifecycle is not.
At JBS, this distinction is increasingly important in how we think about building with AI. Non-technical teams should absolutely experiment and prototype, particularly when it helps translate deep domain knowledge into technology. But when an application becomes important to the business, it needs to be treated like something the business intends to own.
The question changes
The build-versus-buy debate has not disappeared. AI has simply moved the line.
It has given the people closest to business problems far more ability to shape the technology that solves them. That is a significant opportunity, as long as we do not confuse the ease of creating software with the responsibility of running it.
Once a prototype becomes part of how the business operates, the question changes.
It is no longer: Can we build this?
It is: Are we prepared to own it?
This article is authored by Anushay Rashid, JBS Alpha Lead at JBS.
The post Vibe Coding Made Software Cheaper to Build, but Not to Own appeared first on ProPakistani.
