Build it in-house or buy Risk360? Here is the honest math.
Building your own system is a real option, and for a few teams it is the right one. You get total control and an exact fit. The catch is everything that comes before your first trading day: hiring the desk, building the ISO connectivity, wiring the data feeds, and then maintaining all of it forever.
Build in-house vs. buy Risk360
The honest comparison, so you can decide on the math, not the pitch.
| Consideration | Build in-house | Buy Risk360Us |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first trading day | 12 to 24 months to something production-grade | 2 to 6 weeks onboarding |
| Upfront cost | Engineers, traders, infrastructure, data feeds | Subscription, scoped to your footprint |
| Team you must hire | Traders, schedulers, gas experts, data engineers, devops | Optional — managed desk available as an extension of your team |
| ISO and market connectivity | Build and maintain 7 ISO integrations yourself | Prebuilt and maintained across all 7 U.S. ISOs |
| Regulatory changes | You track them and re-code | Handled in the platform |
| Edge-case fit | Total control, exactly your rules | Configurable, covers the functions retail suppliers use |
| Key-person risk | High — the knowledge lives in a few heads | Spread across a 35-person team and 200-plus combined years |
| Ongoing maintenance | Yours, forever | Included, with continuous updates |
| DR, security, uptime | You build, test, and own it | Cloud SaaS with DR and BCP, 24/7/365 |
Figures reflect typical retail-supplier builds and Risk360 onboarding ranges. Your mileage varies with scope.
Where each option actually wins
No vendor is best at everything. Here is the honest read, so you can pick on fit, not noise.
Building wins when
You have a deep engineering and trading bench, genuinely unique requirements no platform covers, and you want the system as an owned asset — and you can afford to wait a year or more to go live.
Buying wins when
You want to be live in weeks, keep your people on decisions instead of maintenance, and would rather rent proven ISO connectivity and an experienced desk than hire and build it from scratch.
The hybrid most teams land on
Buy the platform for the commodity plumbing, keep a small internal team for the parts that are truly proprietary. Risk360 is API-first, so you can build on top of it instead of around it.