“We lost £1.2 million and six months stuck with a vendor.” – A founder’s bitter lesson.
Speed is lifeblood at early-stage ventures. Choose the wrong SaaS stack, and you’re not just stuck, you’re haemorrhaging cash, burning time, and bleeding optionality.
Build your own?
You’re in the same boat, just rowing slower. Enter: cost-of-delay (CoD). It’s the financial frame that turns gut feel into board-room arithmetic.
SaaS is a startup lifeline. It’s fast and scalable. But there’s a catch: lock-in.
A 2024 report shows 73% of firms used hybrid clouds last year. The market hit $85 billion in 2021. Lock-in—high fees, data traps—kills flexibility. Building in-house gives control but delays launches. In cybersecurity, delays can mean breaches.
CoD quantifies the cost of waiting. It’s a tool to keep your startup lean.
In short: lock-in kills flexibility. And self-builds drag delivery. CoD is your quant model for when neither option looks pretty.
The Lock-In Tax
SaaS onboarding is seductively easy. But under the hood? Traps. Try exporting your telemetry. Try rehosting workflows that hinge on their SDK. Vendors bake in friction — and in cybersecurity, delays aren’t just annoying. They’re expensive.
- Breaches cost: Industry numbers peg a single incident at ~£3 million.
- Switching cost: Uprooting vendors might burn £80,000 and three months.
- Opportunity cost: Every week of delay costs pipeline and posture.
You don’t need a full-blown risk register. Just basic CoD maths: revenue lost per week × time delayed = your actual burn.
DIY Doesn’t Mean Free
Yes, building gives you control. Yes, you can tune detection thresholds and drop false positives. But it’s not cheap:
- Dev team ramp: Hiring or reassigning talent delays GTM by six months.
- Lost sales: That delay? It’s £50,000/month in missed revenue — or more, if you’re enterprise-focused.
In one scenario I scoped, the CoD of a homegrown SIEM was £300,000. The vendor quote was painful, but cheaper. Numbers win over instinct.
SaaS ≠ Scalable, Unless You Can Leave
SaaS only scales if you can adapt. If your CRM vendor lags on features, your sales ops grind. If your MDR partner can’t ingest third-party logs, your attack surface grows.
Don’t Let Inertia Set Your Burn Rate
Founders don’t need more dashboards. They need leverage. CoD gives you that:
- Aim for portability: Can you export logs and workflows and import somewhere else without breaking things?
- Train for independence: Knowledge cuts support tickets and vendor reliance.
- Back up in open formats
- Model switching costs early: If a vendor goes stale, can you afford to leave?
One Final Question
What’s the cost of doing nothing this week?
Because startups don’t die from lack of features. They die from delay.
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