Four ways to get automation done.
An agency, your own team, an off-the-shelf tool, or me. Each one is the right call in certain situations, so I've laid the trade-offs out side by side, including the spots where the alternatives genuinely win.
Everything that matters, side by side.
Where an alternative genuinely holds up, I marked it that way. You'll notice building in-house collects a lot of checks too (that's real, and I get into it below).
Workflowsy
Workflowsy"Why not just…": fair answers.
These are the three questions I hear most on calls, and each of them deserves a real answer rather than a sales pitch.
Why not hire an agency?
Plenty of agencies do excellent work, and if you find a great one, hire them. But a lot of them staff your project with junior teams, keep the code on their servers, and bill against a moving estimate. With me you get one senior builder, a fixed price before we start, and code that lives in your cloud.
Why not build it in-house?
If you've got senior engineers with spare cycles, building in-house is a fine call. You'll own it and know it cold. The catch is that most teams don't have the cycles, automation isn't their day job, and "we'll get to it" has a way of becoming never. I ship in weeks, to the same standard I used on F500 finance systems, and then hand you the keys.
Why not use an off-the-shelf tool?
If a SaaS tool maps cleanly to how you work, buy it. It's cheaper and faster than anything custom, full stop. The problem is that off-the-shelf bends your business to its model, holds your data, and walks out the door the day you stop paying. I build around your actual process, and you keep it.
If an off-the-shelf tool genuinely solves your problem, use it (I'll tell you if I think one does).
My case is simple: own your automation.
If custom-and-owned looks like the right answer for you, let's scope it together. And if the call makes it clear it isn't, that's a genuinely useful outcome too.