Build vs buy
Your team has three real options. Here is how they compare, from someone who has sat on both sides of it.
Three paths
You get full control. But the backlog is brutal: translation memory, terminology, workflows, QA, review, permissions, audit, APIs, connectors. Each is a project on its own, and the maintenance never ends. Control is real; so is the internal roadmap it demands.
Fast to start, and someone else runs it. But you live inside per-word and per-seat economics, you wait on the vendor's roadmap for anything they haven't built, and your content sits in someone else's cloud on their terms, not yours.
A working system on day one, and the whole repo, shaped to your stack. The middle path: it keeps build's control without build's backlog. You own the software and the source, self-hosted, with nothing to turn off if the vendor walks away.
Side by side
Qualitative, because the numbers depend on your team and your content. What does not change is the shape of each trade-off.
| Build internally | Cloud SaaS TMS | Localization Studio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering effort to start | A long internal roadmap before anyone translates a word | Little; you configure an account | Install and run; a working system on day one |
| Source ownership | Yours, but you have to write it first | None; the code stays the vendor's | The whole repo, yours to host and modify |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Rarely; cloud is the default | Yes; that is the whole idea |
| Customization | Unlimited, if you have the team to sustain it | Only within the vendor's settings | Unlimited; you hold the source |
| Data control | In your building | In someone else's cloud | In your building, with nowhere else for it to go |
| AI and model choice | Whatever you wire up and keep current | The vendor's models, on the vendor's roadmap | Frontier API, your approved models, or a local GPU; no code changes |
| Time to first translation | A long roadmap away | Days | Days |
| Ongoing maintenance | Yours, forever | The vendor's | Yours, but built to stay light |
| Updates | You build every one of them | Arrive on the vendor's schedule | Included for three years; every version yours to keep |
| What you pay for | Engineering time, forever | Subscriptions, seats, and per-word fees | One license, paid once; updates included for three years |
Every cell here is a trade-off, not a scoreboard. Pick the row that keeps you up at night, and read across it.
The hidden line item
Every path has a cost that never shows up in the pitch. It is worth naming all three before you decide.
The internal system is only as durable as the team that owns it. People move on, priorities shift, and the tool that was going to save money becomes the thing nobody wants to touch. An internal build is a standing commitment, not a one-time cost.
The longer you run on cloud SaaS, the more your memory, terminology, and history live on the vendor's side. Leaving gets harder every quarter, which is exactly what the pricing counts on. That gravity is the real switching cost.
Self-hosted means you own the operations. Localization Studio is built to make that light. It runs in Docker or plain Python, as one process by default, with no Kubernetes to stand up. Real work for your team, kept as small as it can be.
Bring the questions your team keeps circling. I'll show you the actual product and we can read the comparison against your real stack.
Schedule a technical walkthrough →
or email brent@patoislabs.com