Build vs buy

The real cost of building your own activity log.

"It's just an events table" is how every in-house audit log starts. Here's the line-by-line estimate of what production-grade activity logging actually takes — priced at loaded engineering cost — next to what Softechlog charges.

The trade-off

Build in-house or ship this sprint.

Both are legitimate choices. Building makes sense when activity infrastructure is your product. For everyone else, it's undifferentiated plumbing that competes with your roadmap.

Build In-House

  • Initial ship: 6–12 weeks including schema, ingestion, feed APIs, and UI states.
  • Maintenance: ongoing work for retention, indexing, and query performance as volume grows.
  • Risk: incomplete events make support and compliance workflows brittle — and gaps only surface when you need the history.
  • Opportunity cost: those same weeks spent on features customers pay for.

Use Softechlog

  • Initial ship: first timeline in days — install an SDK, call track(), drop in the feed component.
  • Maintenance: retention, pagination, key scoping, and export handled for you.
  • Risk: one consistent event model from day one; export as CSV/JSON on every plan, so no lock-in.
  • Opportunity cost: none of your sprint — the integration is an afternoon.

The math

Engineering weeks × loaded cost.

Estimates assume one mid/senior product engineer at $4,400/week fully loaded (~$210k/year including payroll tax, benefits, and overhead, over 48 working weeks). Adjust to your own numbers — the shape of the conclusion rarely changes.

What you'd buildEng-weeksLoaded cost
Event schema & data modelActor/action/target shape, metadata rules, migrations, indexes1$4,400
Ingestion APIValidation, auth, idempotency, batching, rate limiting1.5$6,600
Query & pagination APICursor pagination, filtering by actor/action/target/time1.5$6,600
Customer-facing feed UILoading, empty, and error states; theming; framework wrappers2$8,800
Key management & scopingSecret vs public credentials, per-user read tokens, revocation1.5$6,600
Retention & exportScheduled purges, CSV/JSON export, storage growth control1.5$6,600
Hardening & production readinessLoad behavior, monitoring, backfill and replay edge cases1.5$6,600
Initial build total10.5$46,200

That's the first version only. Budget a further 10–15% of the build cost per year for maintenance — retention jobs that drift, indexes that stop fitting memory, and the pagination bug you find in a support escalation. None of this includes the customer-facing polish (theming, empty states, timezone handling) that makes a feed feel like a product instead of a log dump.

Softechlog Free

$0/month

10,000 events/mo, 30-day retention, 1 project. Enough to validate the integration end-to-end before launch.

Softechlog Growth

$29/month

250,000 events/mo, 90-day retention. A full year costs $348 — about 133× less than the initial build alone.

Softechlog Scale

$99/month

2,000,000 events/mo, 365-day retention. A full year costs $1,188 — still a fraction of one engineering month.

Full plan details are on the pricing page. Every plan includes SDKs, auto-capture, the feed component, and CSV/JSON export.

Honest caveats

When building yourself is the right call.

We'd rather you pick correctly than pick us.

Build if…

  • Activity data is your product — you're selling analytics or observability itself.
  • You have hard data-residency requirements that rule out third-party storage.
  • Your event volume is so large that infrastructure cost dominates engineering cost.

Buy if…

  • You need an audit trail or activity feed as a feature, not as your core business.
  • Your team is small and roadmap time is your scarcest resource.
  • You want SOC 2-friendly event history without building retention and scoping controls first.

Weighing other options too — analytics tools, log platforms, enterprise audit vendors? See the full alternatives comparison.

Want a second opinion on your event schema before you decide?

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