Every team is asking the same question: should we wire up a hosted API, or build something custom? The answer depends less on capability and more on what you’re optimizing for.
When buy is enough
- Your use case maps cleanly to a general-purpose model
- Latency and cost at your expected volume are acceptable
- You don’t need fine-grained control over training data or inference
When you need to own more of the stack
- Your domain has specialized vocabulary or compliance requirements
- Retrieval quality is the product, not a nice-to-have
- You need audit trails, on-prem deployment, or data residency guarantees
The trap is building custom infrastructure before you’ve validated that the problem is worth solving at all.
Start with the fastest path to a real user test. Upgrade to custom only when the constraints of a managed service become a blocker — not a hypothetical one.
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