Build vs Buy in the AI era

In this session, we’re getting into the real talk behind one of the most common — and quietly costly — calls that engineering and finance leaders make: build or buy your FinOps tooling.

7th May - 5:00 PM CEST / 11:00 AM EST

Most teams don’t set out to build a FinOps tool. It just kind of… happens.

A script here, a dashboard there … and suddenly you’ve got a homegrown system that three engineers understand and nobody wants to touch.

We’ve seen this pattern play out across organizations of every size, and we’ve lived it myself.

What starts as a workaround becomes a liability: consuming engineering hours, concentrating critical knowledge, and hitting a ceiling every time the environment gets more complex.

And right now? Complexity is accelerating daily, driven by exploding AI adoption.

The hidden costs of building don’t show up in your budget. But in an AI-first world, they’re more real than ever.

What we’ll dig into:

Why AI spend breaks every DIY framework built for traditional cloud
The compounding advantages of buying: day-one maturity, a platform that scales, and engineering cycles back for work that matters
What it actually looks like to trade maintenance cycles for engineering momentum — and how to make the case internally