of course it is a balancing act, plenty of companies use no-code or low-code tools for limited small-scale uses. Classic one is CMS, few companies have legitimate reasons to build their own custom CMS instead of using a SaaS one. You need to be at a scale where you have so much content written/managed by so many people that it makes sense to do custom. Or have exoteric types of content
It reminds me of a guy I interviewed who worked at a fashion brand as a software engineer, his job was to build a custom system to automate fitting photos of clothes to photos of people to put in the e-commerce site. Previously they did it manually with photoshop, but they needed an army of photoshop guys to do it. His solution was custom to the needs of the company (ie only the poses they needed), a generic SaaS solution, if it existed, would have probably been too complex to use or maintain
In general the Joel rule applies: "If it is core to your business, you want to do it in-house". Although I can think of a few exceptions, like payment/subscription flows for e-commerce. But heck I bet Amazon has their own custom payment/subscription systems for each market
It reminds me of a guy I interviewed who worked at a fashion brand as a software engineer, his job was to build a custom system to automate fitting photos of clothes to photos of people to put in the e-commerce site. Previously they did it manually with photoshop, but they needed an army of photoshop guys to do it. His solution was custom to the needs of the company (ie only the poses they needed), a generic SaaS solution, if it existed, would have probably been too complex to use or maintain
In general the Joel rule applies: "If it is core to your business, you want to do it in-house". Although I can think of a few exceptions, like payment/subscription flows for e-commerce. But heck I bet Amazon has their own custom payment/subscription systems for each market