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Build vs Buy vs Subscribe Advisor
For one use case: build it on the API, buy a vertical SaaS tool, or just buy seats of a general assistant? See the real 3-year cost of each before you decide.
Get started-
Costiva sells API-cost monitoring, so a tool that quietly steers you toward building has a conflict of interest — that conflict is disclosed on this page, and the numbers are never bent to favor a build.
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Never just names a winner: every recommendation ships with its own break-even — the volume at which the answer would flip to a different option.
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Computed entirely in your browser. Nothing you type about your use case, volume, or costs is ever sent to a server unless you choose to save it.
Frequently asked questions
No — and that conflict of interest is exactly why we say it out loud on this page. The three-way cost model uses the numbers you enter and nothing else; it never applies a hidden preference toward the option Costiva happens to make money from. In practice, most specific SMB use cases at real-world volumes come out ahead on Buy or Subscribe — Build only wins when volume is high, the process is deeply specific to your business, and you already have the technical capability to maintain it.
By comparing the total cost of each option — one-off setup plus running cost — over 12, 24 and 36 months at the monthly volume you enter. How specific your use case is to your own business and data is weighted heavily in the Buy option's assumed coverage, because a generic process is usually already solved by an off-the-shelf tool, while a deeply specific one usually is not.
Read the break-even line first — every recommendation states the volume at which the answer flips to a different option, so you can judge how close your own numbers are to that line. If your in-house technical capability is "none," Build carries an explicit risk warning regardless of what the arithmetic says, because execution risk is real even when the numbers look attractive.
No. If Buy wins, this tool describes the category and the evaluation criteria that matter for your data sensitivity, then hands you off to the Vendor AI Due Diligence Questionnaire — it never names or ranks a specific vendor.
None for the maths — every cost figure is computed deterministically in your browser from the numbers you enter. There is one optional button that asks Claude to write your tailored recommendation as a short narrative and decision rationale from the numbers you already see; it uses a single Claude Haiku run and never changes a figure.
No. The advisor is free and unlimited with no account and no signup. An account is only needed to save a decision to your library so you can revisit it at the trigger point it states, and to use the optional AI recommendation-writing action.