Open-source Effect On Build Vs. Buy

When you’re selling or considering purchasing a B2B tool, you need to understand the build vs. buy argument. What are the pros and cons of building the tool internally vs. buying the tool from a third-party vendor? This is especially true in big companies where you have the resources to build the said tools. Early-stage startups will generally opt for the faster route, going with self-served B2B tools — unless the pricing is prohibitive. 

But something we don’t often think about is how open-source just messes the whole thing up. The build is completely redefined. You now need to compare the B2B tool with the build without the open-source tool, as well as with the open-source tool, which most often lowers the barrier significantly. 

In this article, we’ll take the example of the ETL/ELT industry. We know it best, as we’re building Airbyte, the open-source ELT alternative. Let’s see how open-source for ETL / ELT with Airbyte is also flipping the previous Build vs. Buy balance on its head. 

We’ve produced an infographic to illustrate that point. You will see that without taking Airbyte into consideration, the build vs. buy was pretty useful with Fivetran, in contrast to building connectors yourself. But now, with Airbyte, you can either just use the open-sourced connectors and start replicating data in minutes for free, or even build new connectors (if ever Airbyte doesn’t support them) in a matter of days (vs. months before) with maintenance being crowdsourced throughout the Airbyte community. 

Let’s just say it: the playing field has changed!

Some context: the average business today uses well over 100 software apps, many of which contain valuable insights about an organization’s operations. Your company is likely on the way to using just as many apps, if not more, and you’ll need a solution to integrate all of the data your apps produce. 

Building your own pipeline by yourself is a significant time commitment. It can take between 3-6 months to set up a basic pipeline. Furthermore, beyond the time commitment, there is some inherent complexity in building a reliable, high-performance ELT pipeline. You need to: 

In contrast, an off-the-shelf solution such as Fivetran can be set up in a matter of minutes with prebuilt connectors. Airbyte also takes literally 30 seconds to deploy, and you can start replicating data within 2 minutes. 

The big difference between both options in terms of time and effort is that all the Fivetran customers we talked to also had to build and maintain connectors on the side, as the connectors they needed were either not supported in the way they needed or not supported at all by Fivetran.

That’s where the option to build with Airbyte comes in. For connectors not supported by Airbyte, it is a matter of hours to build connectors. Indeed, Airbyte already took care of having a UI, monitoring, scheduling, orchestration, integration with your data stack, automatic schema changes, etc. There is a very high chance we support your destination. So in the end, it’s only the EL part of the source connector you have to build, and Airbyte is providing some abstractions to make that easier. 

Regarding maintenance, the goal of Airbyte is to crowdsource throughout the community.