IoT Platforms: Build vs Buy Your Back End Infrastructure

Your back end is the decision every other decision sits on top of. Firmware talks to it, the mobile app depends on it, your unit economics run through it, and your ability to ship the next feature is governed by it.

What makes the build vs. buy choice hard is that you’re deciding who controls your product roadmap, what your unit economics look like at the fleet size you’re planning for, and who owns the platform your product runs on.

Four variables determine where you land: how fast you need to get moving, how many devices you expect to ship, whether you have a team to maintain what you end up with, and how long you plan to operate the business. Most companies weigh only the first one.

What Does Buying an IoT Platform Get You?

You get started right away

The platform exists, it works, and your devices can be talking to it in a fraction of the time it takes to stand up your own. Less development time on your side, less to figure out before you see data flowing.

Security and functionality come out of the box

Commercial platforms ship with security guarantees and general functionality already built. You inherit a system other companies are already running on, rather than making every architectural decision yourself.

Verify rather than assume. A number of these platforms have been exposed over the years to have serious security issues. Treat “secure by default” as a claim to audit, not a feature to check off.

It costs less up front

Buying is cheaper at the start, and vendors make it cheaper still. A discounted price to get you onboard is standard practice in this category. If capital is tight and the open question is whether the product works at all, that discount is doing real work for you.

Where Does Buying an IoT Platform Break Down?

Your roadmap becomes the vendor’s roadmap

You get the capabilities that platform has, and you’re one of many customers who may or may not have a voice in what gets added and when. New platform capability stops being a product decision you make and becomes a support ticket you file.

When the feature you need isn’t on their list, you have two options: buy another product to fill the gap, or build the missing piece yourself. Both mean paying twice for the thing you were trying to avoid paying for once.

Prices go up, and per-device pricing gets brutal at scale

The pattern is consistent. A company selects a platform because it looks cost-effective. The first renewal comes, prices go up, and what was viable for the business may not be viable anymore.

The mechanism underneath it is usually per-device pricing. These platforms are cheap with a small number of devices and very expensive with a lot of them. Your cost curve is tied to your device count rather than to what you actually consume. If you’re pre-revenue or not yet profitable and you scale faster than planned, you carry platform costs that grew with your fleet while you’re still working out how the business model closes. Success becomes the thing that breaks you.

You own nothing, and the vendor might not last

You don’t own any part of the platform. If they raise the price, you have no right to take your work and deploy it somewhere else. The decision reduces to how much you trust that organization to keep pricing stable indefinitely, with nothing forcing it to.

A lot of these companies come and go. If the vendor doesn’t survive and your entire infrastructure sits on top of them, that becomes your team’s emergency on someone else’s timeline.

Moving off a platform is a real project, though it is a well-understood one. Migrations off proprietary IoT platforms are a regular part of our work, and the companies that do them tend to wish they had started with the platform they ended up with. The point is not that you’re trapped. It’s that the exit is expensive enough to shape every negotiation you have with that vendor until you take it.

What Do You Get From Building Your Own IoT Platform?

You own the IP from the start

Everything you build is yours. The cloud account, the source code, the infrastructure configuration, the data. Not licensed, not rented, not contingent on a relationship staying good.

You still use vendor tools, without the lock-in

Building doesn’t mean building from nothing. It means building in your own AWS or Azure account and using the native services, IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub, that do most of the heavy lifting. Standard protocols, no proprietary SDK between your product and your data.

You’re still leveraging a vendor, on completely different terms. Cost is much lower, the architecture avoids lock-in if you ever want to move, and pricing is predictable. AWS and Microsoft raise prices over time like everyone else, but they do it predictably, and they’re going to be around.

Your operating cost tracks consumption instead of device count

This is the economic difference that compounds. On a purchased platform, adding devices adds cost by definition. On a platform you own, you pay for the ingest, storage, and compute you actually use. Fleet growth stops being a line item that scales linearly against you.

You build exactly what you need

Nothing more, nothing less. Every company’s requirements are slightly different, and a platform built around yours addresses them specifically rather than approximately. You stop paying for capability you’ll never use and stop working around the absence of capability you need every day.

Scale becomes something you know instead of something you hope

When you buy, you have to trust the vendor will scale their platform to support your load. You don’t actually know.

Building directly on AWS or Azure tooling removes the guesswork. Going from one thousand to ten thousand to a hundred thousand to a million devices is a known quantity. The platform stays up, working, and reliable, because the scaling behavior of those services is documented and proven rather than promised in a sales call.

What Does Building an IoT Platform Cost You?

More money up front

Building is more expensive at the start. That’s the honest trade for lower cost across the life of the product, and if your planning horizon is short, it may not be a trade worth making.

Time, if you do it alone

Build it yourself with no prior experience and it will take a long time, most of it spent figuring things out rather than building. Every architectural decision is one you’re making for the first time, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up later, in the field, in customers’ hands.

Maintenance you have to staff

Every platform requires maintenance. Yours will too. The difference is that maintenance on a platform you buy is priced invisibly into the subscription, while maintenance on a platform you own is a line item you have to plan for.

How Do You Decide Between Building and Buying?

1. How quickly do you need to get moving?

If the answer is measured in weeks with no room to negotiate, buying answers that. If it’s measured in quarters, speed stops being the deciding factor and long-term economics take over.

2. What can you afford now versus what can you afford to maintain?

Two different budgets pulling in opposite directions. Buying optimizes the first. Building optimizes the second. Which one is under more pressure in your business is most of your answer.

3. Do you have an engineering team to maintain it?

Every platform needs maintenance, whether you own it or rent it.

The best case is a company that has its own engineering team but lacks the specific expertise to stand a platform like this up. A partner like Very builds it quickly, the in-house team maintains it from there. If that team doesn’t exist, maintenance can be handled by Very at relatively low cost, but it should be a decision you make deliberately rather than one you discover later.

4. What are your security and data governance requirements?

Do the platforms you’re evaluating actually comply with what you need? Do you have specific data governance obligations based on where the product will be sold and where the data has to reside? Those constraints narrow the field fast, and they’re far harder to retrofit than to design for.

5. Where is your device count headed?

Run platform pricing against the fleet size you’re planning for, not the one you have today. If per-device pricing is comfortable at a thousand units and untenable at a hundred thousand, you’ve found the date your business model breaks.

Build vs. Buy: Side-by-Side

So, Build or Buy?

For most companies, building is the right call.

That recommendation comes from what we watch happen in the market. Year over year, a meaningful share of the customers who come to us bought a platform, got disappointed by the vendor, and need help migrating off. Once you count what they had already paid that platform over the years, migrating cost more than building right from the start would have.

There is a real exception. If you’re confident you’re going to launch, move very fast, and exit quickly, buying makes sense. Short horizon, short-term choice, and the costs that arrive later arrive for someone else.

If you plan to operate your company for multiple years into the future, build. And the fastest way to build it right is with Very, which has done it hundreds of times already.

What Does IoT Platform Development With Very Look Like?

We build the full path from device to cloud, deployed into your own AWS or Azure account. 

Every engagement delivers four things:

• A running device-to-cloud platform, live in your account.

• A scale roadmap for what changes as the fleet grows.

• A running device-to-cloud platform, live in your account.

• Infrastructure and firmware as code — Terraform, CDK, or Bicep, CI/CD, and a signed OTA pipeline.

An architecture and cost model at your current fleet size and at ten times that, so the economics are a number you can plan against rather than a surprise on an invoice.

If you’re already on a platform and looking for a way off it, that’s the same work in a different order, and we do it regularly. Start a Conversation