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Key Takeaways The most important infrastructure decisions founders make often look technical on the surface but carry far deeper strategic consequences.
Before choosing to build or buy, leaders should pressure-test their assumptions to avoid hidden risks that can quietly shape their company’s future.
Most founders think the build-versus-buy decision when it comes to backend infrastructure is about engineering tradeoffs. I used to think that too.
At UNest, I learned the hard way that it’s actually about control. The moment that lesson landed, it permanently changed how I make decisions as a founder.
This is the story of how that realization happened — and the five-question framework I now use to decide whether to build or buy, grounded in real decisions we made while scaling a regulated fintech company.
Know when build vs. buy becomes a control issue
At UNest, we set out to modernize how families save and invest for their kids. In the early days, we were focused on what most founders focus on: building features, refining onboarding and making a complex financial product feel intuitive.
As we scaled, we crossed an invisible line. We weren’t just building a product anymore — we were building on top of infrastructure that increasingly dictated what we could and couldn’t do. Simple features required approval from external partners. Engineering timelines were shaped by third-party constraints. Compliance requirements forced us into workarounds that added fragility instead of resilience.
At first, I treated this as normal fintech friction. Eventually, it became clear that something more fundamental was happening. Key factors influencing speed, risk and reliability were no longer fully under our control.
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