Form Builder: The Build vs Buy Dilemma
In the competitive world of SaaS, the choice to build or buy can have a significant impact on your product's time-to-market, maintenance burden, and long-term scalability. For product teams and developers, choosing whether to build a form builder in-house or integrate an established solution (SDK or library) is not merely about initial costs. It involves a deep understanding of your team’s technical resources, the complexity of your user requirements, and the long-term roadmap for your product.
This article delves into the specific considerations for deciding to buy rather than build a form builder solution, especially within technical and development-focused SaaS environments. We explore the real-world costs and benefits of buying versus building.
1. Time to Market and Resource Allocation
Building a form builder from scratch is a resource-intensive process, requiring developers to devote weeks or months to design, test, and deploy a usable solution. A simple form builder might seem easy at first glance, but ensuring it meets modern user expectations—like drag-and-drop functionality, conditional logic, data validation, and responsive design—demands significant development effort.
Considerations:
Feature Set Requirements: Even a basic form builder will need essential features, which can take months to develop and polish.
Developer Hours: Those hours could be invested in differentiating your product instead of reinventing form functionality.
The Buy Advantage: An embeddable form builder allows you to skip months of development, getting your product to market faster and enabling your team to stay focused on core features that make your SaaS offering unique.
2. Complexity and Maintenance Overhead
Forms are rarely “fire-and-forget” components. Users demand advanced functionality, such as complex data validations, conditional fields, and responsive layouts across devices. Each added feature increases the code complexity, and your team must account for bugs, versioning, and future updates to keep the form builder operational.
Considerations:
Technical Debt: Building in-house introduces technical debt that your team will need to maintain and update.
Security and Compliance: Data entry forms are often a key point of user data capture, necessitating strict adherence to privacy laws and data encryption standards.
The Buy Advantage: A pre-built solution reduces your maintenance burden by providing ready-to-use, continuously updated features, many of which are designed to handle complex forms, user data protection, and compliance right out of the box.
3. Scalability and Customization
If your application needs to support complex workflows and high volumes of data submissions, scalability becomes a primary concern. Scaling a custom-built form builder requires constant monitoring and optimizing as user loads increase, which can strain your development resources. Additionally, if your team needs to add custom features in the future, modifying in-house code could introduce instability.
Considerations:
Performance Optimization: As usage grows, you’ll need to monitor performance and make changes to support high availability and fast load times.
Customizability vs. Stability: Making the form builder adaptable to future needs requires a balance of customization and reliability.
The Buy Advantage: A robust embeddable form builder is optimized for scalability from the start, supporting a high volume of submissions with performance-tested features. Many solutions also offer customization options, allowing your team to adjust styling, form fields, and functionality without sacrificing stability.
4. Total Cost of Ownership
The long-term costs of a homegrown form builder extend beyond initial development. Ongoing maintenance, security updates, and scaling efforts add to the total cost of ownership (TCO). This can escalate if your team lacks specialized experience in form-related UX design, security, or performance.
Considerations:
Ongoing Expenses: Regularly updating, patching, and optimizing the form builder for security and usability incurs ongoing costs.
Hidden Costs: Training, documentation, and potential downtime during major updates are additional expenses often overlooked.
The Buy Advantage: Buying an embeddable form builder consolidates these costs into predictable subscription fees, allowing you to plan your budget with clarity and focus. By leveraging a SaaS form builder, your product’s form functionality can benefit from continual updates and feature expansions at no added development cost to your team.
Conclusion
For product teams and developers, the decision to build or buy a form builder isn’t solely about feature checklists. It’s about strategically allocating development resources, reducing technical debt, and focusing on delivering your product's unique value. With the rapid pace of SaaS innovation, investing in a reliable, pre-built form builder ensures faster time to market, long-term scalability, and a cost-effective, future-proof solution that empowers your team to stay agile.
By choosing to buy an established form builder SDK, you’ll be investing in a proven, efficient, and highly customizable tool that frees up your resources to focus on what really matters: growing your product and delighting your users.