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  5. Build vs Buy AI
Industry & Business

Build vs Buy AI

The choice between training or fine-tuning your own model versus calling a provider API.

Ask Melo about this← all terms

Buy wins on time-to-market and frontier quality; build wins on data control, unit economics at huge volume, and air-gapped deployments. Most companies buy the model and build the retrieval, evals, and workflow. Switching costs show up later as prompt lock-in and logged customer data sitting at the vendor.

Related terms

AI Vendor Lock-InFine-TuningAI Total Cost of OwnershipOpen WeightsFrontier ModelAI Adoption