DIY works. Until you price it.
Building your own rendering host is the fastest way to get live, and the slowest thing you'll ever stop maintaining. Three costs that never make the business case:
The maintenance tax
A week, a month, every month. Patching, dependency upgrades, scaling, monitoring- engineering time that never shows up on an invoice and never stops.
The security review stall
Months, not weeks. Custom infrastructure proves its posture from scratch at every review. Go-live dates slip while InfoSec asks questions you built no answers for.
The key-person risk
One person deep. If a single resignation can take your delivery platform down, you don't own an asset — you owe a liability.
The Opportunity Cost
Every sprint spent on nursing infrastructure is a sprint not spent shipping product. The real bill isn't the maintenance, it's the roadmap you keep pushing back.
If not DIY, then what?
Not ready to change anything? Fair. Here's the research the teams ahead of you read before they decided.
Netlify & Vercel vs. managed delivery
A week a month, every month. Patching, dependency upgrades, scaling, monitoring — engineering time that never shows up on an invoice, and never stops.
Running the head yourself, properly
what a production-grade self-hosted rendering setup on Azure really involves for XM Cloud.
The Hosting Options Assessment
a side-by-side evaluation framework for every hosting path: DIY, PaaS, and managed. PDF, 12 pages.
The security gap nobody scopes
why headless architectures quietly widen your attack surface, and who ends up owning it.