Should you build your own print e-commerce platform? Here’s what it actually costs

Build cost estimates based on published figures from MLSDev, Lizard Global, and Cleveroad. Developer salary data: Glassdoor, 2025.

*Based on Infigo customer data.

The cost that doesn’t show up in a budget

There’s one cost that almost never makes it into the business case: the time your own team spends on it.

Every hour your operations manager, IT lead, or senior developer puts into a platform build is an hour they’re not spending on your actual business. Pre-press, production, customer relationships, new business. All of it takes a back seat.

“It takes them away from their day job,” Paul says. “The SDRs, account managers, operations staff. They should be doing what they’re good at. Instead they’re being pulled into requirements meetings for a system that might not work.”

And it nearly always takes longer than planned. Print e-commerce requirements have a habit of revealing themselves in layers. You don’t know what’s missing until a customer tries to do something your platform can’t handle.

Can your IT team really build and maintain this?

“They think they can do everything,” Paul says. “They want that responsibility in-house because that’s what they love to do. And fair enough, but the reality is more complex than they expect.”

The appeal of building in-house almost always comes from the IT team, and their reasoning is understandable: control. Their own architecture, their own servers or cloud environment, their own data. Nobody else’s decisions affecting the roadmap.

What that control looks like in practice is being responsible for every security update, every API change, every compatibility issue when a third-party service shifts. When something breaks on a Friday evening before a deadline, it’s your team’s problem to fix.

A dedicated platform runs on enterprise infrastructure with a team whose entire job is uptime, security, and reliability. What can feel like surrendering control is often better described as moving risk somewhere better equipped to manage it.

It’s also worth noting that “off the shelf” doesn’t mean rigid. Within Infigo’s platform, there’s significant room to build something genuinely tailored (branded B2B portals, custom product configurations, bespoke checkout experiences). If you have developers in-house, the platform gives them a foundation to build on rather than a ceiling to bump against.

Can a small team actually keep up?

We put this question to Hector Occomore, Infigo’s Professional Services Team Lead: can a typical in-house team realistically keep pace with how fast print e-commerce is moving?

“It depends on how good they are,” he says. “A two or three-person team of capable developers could manage it. But you’d need dedicated people, and you’d need to keep shipping new features constantly. A one-person band? Probably not.”

The challenge isn’t just the build. It’s staying current.

Print e-commerce has shifted significantly in the last few years alone: AI-assisted design, deeper MIS integration, mobile-first ordering, real-time personalisation. Infigo has more than 20 people working on nothing but this. Matching that pace with a small internal team, while also maintaining what you’ve already built and supporting your users, is a very tall order.

“If they built something three or four years ago and haven’t kept up,” Paul says, “they’re already outdated and rigid. The system won’t grow with the business. And then the expenses keep coming on top of that.”

When the person who built it leaves

Here’s a risk that almost never makes it into the business case.

Every custom system has a champion. The developer or technical lead who made the architectural decisions, knows where everything is, and can fix the problems nobody else can diagnose. When that person leaves, whoever comes next has to inherit a proprietary system built by someone else, documented imperfectly at best, while keeping it running and developing new features simultaneously.

“They’ve already made a huge investment,” Paul says. “And then someone’s going to have to come in and pick all of that up. That sounds like a complete internal nightmare to me.”

With a dedicated platform, the knowledge isn’t locked in one person. Infigo Academy gives customers and their teams structured training and onboarding resources. So when staff change, capability doesn’t walk out the door with them. Support, documentation, and ongoing development exist independently of any individual, and that continuity has real commercial value.

Should you build or buy a print e-commerce platform?

Paul’s answer to the fence-sitters is straightforward: “Can we build this?” is almost always the wrong question.

A capable development team can build almost anything given time and budget. The more useful question is whether it’s the right use of your time, your money, and your people.

“Is it a good use of their time, money, expertise?” Paul says. “There are lots of different questions they’ve got to be asking and most of them don’t get asked until it’s too late.”

Your expertise is print. Efficient production, strong customer relationships, high-quality output. That’s your competitive advantage. Building and maintaining a web-to-print platform is a different business entirely. It competes for the same internal resources you need to grow.

Technology should support your business. It shouldn’t become your business.

The businesses that come to a dedicated platform after trying to build their own tend to say the same thing: “We should have listened earlier.” Not because building was a bad idea in theory. But because the hidden costs mounted, the time was lost, and the gap between what they’d built and what was available off-the-shelf just kept widening.

“Focus on what you do best as a business,” Paul says, “and let Infigo take this stress away from you.”

Think of it less as a software purchase, and more as a working relationship. One where your feedback shapes the product roadmap, where new features get built in response to real operational needs, and where the platform grows alongside your business rather than becoming a ceiling it bumps against.

And once you’re live, the savings don’t stop at switching platforms. See how automation adds margin once you’re live on a platform.

*Based on Infigo customer data.