Build vs Buy Realtime Infrastructure: A CTO Checklist

Every engineering team building collaborative features eventually faces the build-vs-buy decision for their real-time infrastructure. Both paths have real trade-offs, and the right choice depends on your team's stage, resources, and requirements.

Building your own WebSocket server is straightforward for a prototype. But production-grade real-time infrastructure requires connection management, reconnection logic, state synchronization, horizontal scaling, and monitoring. Most teams underestimate the ongoing maintenance cost: handling edge cases around network partitions, mobile backgrounding, and cross-region latency can consume engineering bandwidth for months.

Buying a managed solution gets you to production faster, but introduces vendor dependency. The key questions to evaluate are: What are the total costs at your expected scale? Can you migrate away if needed? Does the pricing model align with your usage patterns? And does the platform support self-hosting if your compliance or data residency requirements change?

A practical middle path is to start managed and retain the option to self-host. Look for platforms that use standard protocols (WebSocket, not proprietary), offer Docker or Kubernetes deployment options, and do not lock your data into a proprietary format. This lets you ship quickly today while preserving architectural flexibility for the future.