Beyond the price tag: A deep dive into total cost of ownership (TCO) in build vs. buy

When looking for a cost-effective reporting and analytics solution, building your own tool might seem like the better value, at first glance when compared to licensing a third-party tool. However, considering only upfront pricing usually fails to reflect the true cost of this long-term investment. Evaluating a solution’s total cost of ownership (TCO) is important to understand what it takes to maintain, scale, and support a solution over time.

What does total cost of ownership (TCO) really mean?

Also known as the actual cost, TCO refers to all the expenses involved with buying, deploying, using, and managing a product or service. In short, TCO reveals goes beyond the initial price tag — it reveals what upfront costs usually hide. Considering either option — build versus buy — TCO will usually look very different from the start.

The true cost of building from scratch

If you build a tool from scratch, developers can customize the look, feel, and functionality to work exactly as you wish. That said, it’s important to look at the actual costs of customization when building your own solution, including:

Development time

Time is also a resource that’s directly tied to your developers. The amount of time spent on the initial design, testing, and iteration translates directly to cost. Full-time engineers with specialized skills command premium salaries, which can weigh heavily when compared to upfront licensing fees.

Opportunity cost

Every minute, hour, and day your product team spends on building a reporting tool component is time taken away from enhancing your core product. This diversion can lead to missed business opportunities due to lengthy time-to-market timelines, especially in fast-paced business environments.

Competing priorities

Transferring the development of reporting functionalities to your internal product team can unintentionally hurt your core product, as engineers and developers now need to shift their focus. Consequently, your main product may suffer from a lack of innovation and overall maintenance.

Maintenance overhead

Like most software products, homegrown reporting tools require constant maintenance to run efficiently and adapt to meet the needs of your customers. This can become overwhelming for your product team because these tools need your team to constantly write new code, fix bugs, and manage version upgrades as user needs evolve. Over time, this becomes a tasking technical responsibility on the team that takes valuable engineering resources from your core.

Scaling limitations

As data volume grows, the demand can cause performance issues and poor reliability. More often, product teams are eventually forced to re-engineer or even rebuild the tool from scratch for unanticipated future needs.

Support and training demands

Your staff must be adequately conversant with onboarding customers, managing the tool, and responding to customer queries. To do this, they must understand the reporting tool and how it works. Training these individuals becomes another contributing factor to the total cost of building a solution from scratch.

The benefits of buying: How Jaspersoft solves for the unique build requirements

Common misconceptions about buying a ready-made reporting solution are that they usually have high upfront costs, such as the licensing fees for features or users, they won’t fit your customization needs, and they won’t integrate well with your existing tech stack. However, the reality is that modern embedded solutions, such as Jaspersoft, are designed to deliver long-term value, not just a one-time product.

When you buy an off-the-shelf solution, you offload a lot of the technical burden involved in building from scratch. For instance, Jaspersoft usually handles maintenance internally. As such, your product team doesn’t need to constantly check for bugs or updates. This frees up your dev team’s time so they can focus on your product’s core features. Over time, this shift can translate into faster product cycles, fewer technical headaches, and ultimately, a more efficient use of internal resources.

Additionally, tools like Jaspersoft are built with scalability in mind. More specifically, Jaspersoft features optimized rendering engines, multi-tenancy, advanced caching, and cloud-native deployment. Therefore, no matter how much your data grows, the reporting functionality can handle it without outages or failures.

As for training and adoption, ready-made reporting solutions like Jaspersoft often have training resources, documentation, and community support.

When it comes to Jaspersoft, the software exists in two editions — commercial and community. Choosing the right one for your organization is vital. Here’s how the two compare against each other:

Jaspersoft community

Jaspersoft’s community edition is free to download and use. It features Jaspersoft Studio and JasperReports Library, which allow you to design reports and deliver them through custom-coded integration. While it’s useful for prototyping or internal tools, all delivery must be coded, and it doesn’t support advanced features like multi-tenancy, scheduling, and self-service reporting. With the community edition, you can access Jaspersoft’s community support that’s available on its forums page.

While the community edition is a good starting point, limitations may emerge down the line because it doesn’t support multi-tenancy, so as your customers grow, you may experience outage issues. It also lacks support outside of community forums if you experience issues, and has limited ad hoc and self-service tools.

Jaspersoft commercial

The commercial edition is the better choice for OEM and enterprise software companies. It has more features and functionality, including:

• Audit logging: Jaspersoft’s commercial edition ensures that you meet compliance requirements for security purposes. The solution actively records dashboards, reports, and usage, which is essential for auditing purposes.
• Ad hoc reporting: Jaspersoft makes it easy for users to create reports and build data visualizations due to its intuitive user interface. It supports filtering, pivoting, drilling, and interactive charting, and has built-in calculations so you can perform advanced reporting.
• In-memory analysis: Jaspersoft’s commercial edition is able to handle increased data volumes over time. Its in-memory engine enables extremely fast response times when analyzing relational and non-relational data. So, no glitches or slow loading times.
• Professional support: With Jaspersoft’s commercial edition, you get a customer success manager specifically dedicated to helping you leverage the solution more strategically. You also get a support engineer to help with any technical issues you may encounter during your subscription.

When you factor in the total cost of ownership (not just initial build effort and cost), buying a proven, embedded analytics solution like Jaspersoft is your best option.

Want to experience Jaspersoft’s features first-hand in action? Sign up for your free trial today.