Short answer: You should probably buy

Hamel Husain of From Parlance Labs offers clear guidance:

Ask yourself if the capability in question is part of your core skills or future products.

  • If it is, build it.

  • If not, buy.

Choosing between building or buying a chatbot platform demands careful strategic thinking. While Husain’s advice provides a framework, the reality involves nuance. Of the three chatbot use cases — Support, Sales, and Service — most businesses find Support and Sales suited to off-the-shelf solutions, with Service requiring more customization.

When Custom Development Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

In his guest appearance on the Latent Space podcast, Jesse Silver talks about his company’s approach to building vs buying their chatbot framework. Their startup first used a SaaS platform to prototype quickly. As the business grew, they built a custom solution to address platform limitations. This strategy lets companies validate market fit before investing in full development.

Regulated industries like healthcare, finance, and government demand specific chatbot platform characteristics:

  • Deployable on-premises
  • Minimal external dependencies
  • Transparent to internal teams
  • Fully auditable

Open-source frameworks like Langchain, Rasa, and LlamaIndex can meet these standards. Using these frameworks, companies can self-host without building an entire engine from scratch.

Addressing Specialized Use Cases

Some applications require extraordinary customization. For example, there is an AI startup creating vision models to grade stone slabs. They and many other companies in niche industries need to work around constrains like:

  • Integrating custom hardware
  • Supporting niche industry workflows
  • Connecting with proprietary software
  • Handling complex communication protocols

Controlling Sensitive Data

Building becomes crucial when protecting sensitive information. Custom development offers:

  • Complete encryption control
  • Client-side processing
  • Minimal data transmission
  • Granular data protection and RBAC

However, many chatbot SaaS platforms offer secure servers with SOC2 and HIPPA certifications. Even without these certifications, developers can control sensitive data with techniques like:

  1. Building only data retrieval components
  2. Extracting and transmitting data from the frontend
  3. Censoring data before external transmission

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    Buy to Accelerate Your Innovation

    Purchasing a chatbot platform provides clear benefits: faster startup, zero server maintenance, and lower lifetime costs. Many platforms also offer free trials so teams can experiment with minimal risk. My personal favorite chatbot SaaS platform is Botpress.

    Overcoming Resource Limitations

    Small businesses or teams with limited technical capacity can benefit most from low-code platforms. I have seen low-code solutions become perfect fits for scenarios like:

    • A HR team wants to manage chatbot content without making IT tickets
    • A small team maintains a chatbot to optimize onboarding new employees
    • A sales team uses a bot to schedule appointments over email
    • Staff trainers incorporate a chatbot to answer questions with departmental knowledge
    • Team-specific communication bots

    In each scenario, the bots are maintained and used by non-technical employees - something only possible due to low-code platforms’ intuitive UI and accessible documentation.

    Accelerating Time-to-Market

    Tight deadlines and constrained resources make purchased platforms attractive. They shine when:

    • Proof-of-concept needs rapid development
    • Market validation requires speed
    • Resources must stay lean
    • Iteration happens quickly

    Pre-built infrastructures let teams focus on conversational design and user experiences immediately instead of spending precious development time provisioning infrastructure and designing chat frameworks.

    Managing Low-Impact Initiatives

    For chatbots with limited business impact, custom development can be cost prohibitive. Purchased solutions offer:

    • Predictable pricing
    • Instant deployment
    • Reduced maintenance
    • Easy scalability

    Low-code platforms are especially attractive for chatbots catering to internal users as cost-savings measures.

    Need Personalized Guidance?

    Hanakano has helped dozens of businesses navigate their conversational AI projects and achieve major wins. If you’d like personalized guidance through each stage of your chatbot project, please reach out with the button below.

    Book a free 20 minute call

    ❤️

    Gordy