Almost every large wind energy operator hits this question eventually. Wind fleets are complicated. And most companies are already running legacy systems they have no plans to get rid of due to many reasons.
Faced with an off-the-shelf product that doesn’t map cleanly onto that reality, many end up thinking: let’s build it ourselves, and make it fit exactly.
But in most cases, the thinking behind that decision ends at the development estimate, which is often the smallest part of the bill.
What follows is what I tell customers when they ask me this directly. It comes from nine years of consulting on large offshore projects and building the digital processes behind them (which, every now and then, has meant explaining why a process shouldn’t be built at all).
Contents:
Off the Shelf or In-House? A Quick Glance
| Building in-house | Buying software | |
| Time to operational use | 12–18+ months, typically | Weeks |
| Continuity risk | Concentrated in specific individuals | Held by the vendor organization |
| Security and compliance certification | Built and maintained from zero | Already established by the vendor |
| Flexibility | Complete | Bounded by the product, extended via configuration and integration |
| Field tech adoption risk | Unknown until launch, no external track record to draw on | De-risked by an existing user base and field-tested UX |
| Cost as your fleet grows | Marginal cost per new user is low once built | Scales with seats or sites, cost rises with the fleet |
| Control over product direction | Complete | Shared, subject to the vendor’s broader roadmap and customer base |
Already weighing this for your fleet? Book a call and discuss what you’re trying to solve with Fluix experts.
What to Consider When Building Software
Code Alone Is Not Enough
Code matters, obviously, but it’s one piece of a much bigger thing. Besides the developers writing it, you need product and project management, a roadmap, research, QA, security review, legal and compliance sign-off, role-based permissions, and a mobile app for field technicians (with offline mode that works).
AI-assisted development has made it a lot faster to get from an idea to a prototype, but as of now it still doesn’t cover the list above. Yes, AI can help you write the code but it sign off on compliance.
Maintenance Is Permanent
Next come support and maintenance. Someone has to understand the whole system, fix it when it breaks, keep it compatible with everything around it, and onboard new people as you grow.
And that person (or team) never gets to stop. This is a cost you carry for as long as the tool exists.
Budget Estimates Shift
To be fair, there isn’t much public data on in-house software builds that went well. What there is doesn’t look great.
The Standish Group’s original CHAOS Report, published back in 1995 and still one of the most cited studies on software project outcomes, found that only 16.2% of software projects finished on time, on budget, and with the features originally planned. 52.7% were “challenged”: they shipped, but over budget, over schedule, or with less than promised (often all three). 31.1% were cancelled before they were ever finished. And among projects that blew their budget or never got finished, the average cost overrun was 189% of the original estimate.
A bigger and more recent study I came across once lands in a similar place. McKinsey, working with the University of Oxford, looked at more than 5,400 large IT projects. On average, they ran 45% over budget and 7% over schedule, and delivered 56% less value than predicted. One in six (17%) was bad enough to threaten the financial position of the company running it.
So at scale, building is rarely cheaper. Once you add up the people, the money, the time, and the maintenance that never stops, the number looks very different from the one in the original estimate.
Compliance Is a Recurring Cost
Security and compliance don’t end at launch either. We recently went through our own SOC 2 and ISO 27001 renewals, and it took a dedicated team working separately from the people building the product. It wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t easy.
For context: SOC 2 Type 2 renewal audits usually cost somewhere between $15,000 and $45,000 a year. ISO 27001 runs on a three-year cycle with surveillance audits in between, plus several hundred hours of internal staff time just to keep the information security management system running.
That’s what it costs a company whose whole job is making this software. If your whole job is generating power, the math is different.
The Adoption Risk
You spend the time, you spend the money, you ship the thin, and your technicians just don’t use it.
You can get every requirement right on paper and still end up with a tool that doesn’t fit how the job actually gets done. And when that happens, people don’t file a complaint. They quietly go back to paper. Or they text a photo to their supervisor and skip the form entirely.
The hard part is that you can’t really test for this until the tool is already in the field. That’s why I’d rather see a customer pilot something built by a team that has already watched this failure happen a few hundred times.
My Verdict: Don’t Start from Zero
Now, none of this means building is always wrong. It gives you flexibility no commercial product can match, and I won’t pretend otherwise. If you genuinely want to own the technology, that’s a legitimate goal. If you have the people, the budget, a full product team, and a plan that runs years ahead, building can be the right call. But in this case I’d recommend you don’t start from a zero ground.
This pattern already exists in wind. Vestas didn’t build its Scipher analytics platform from scratch. It acquired Utopus Insights, an IBM spin-out, for roughly $100 million in 2018, and built forward from that team’s existing work. SkySpecs did something similar, acquiring Fincovi and Vertikal AI in 2021 to add financial asset management and predictive maintenance it didn’t have in-house. ONYX Insight acquired ELEVEN-I in 2025 specifically to close a gap in blade condition monitoring.
Every one of these companies looked at the problem and decided that buying 80–90% of a working capability, team included, beat building it from nothing.
Not sure which side your use case falls on? Book 30 minutes with Fluix experts, and fond out whether it can be handled through configuration or an integration.
What to Consider When Buying Software
Flexibility Is Limited
A vendor builds its roadmap for its whole customer base, not for your fleet. If something you need isn’t on it, you’re asking, not deciding. And you might wait a release cycle or two just to find out whether it gets prioritized.
This is the trade-off against building: some of your control moves to someone else’s priorities.
Scaling Will Cost Extra
Commercial software is usually priced per seat. Your fleet grows, your bill grows with it. That’s a downside compared to an internal build, where adding one more technician to a tool you already own costs you close to nothing.
The maintenance tax from earlier applies either way, but it doesn’t grow with headcount the way a subscription does.
Product May Change in a Different Direction
A vendor with hundreds of customers makes roadmap decisions based on what most of them need. Not you specifically. A feature you rely on can get redesigned, pushed back, or moved into a different pricing tier.
You’re trusting someone else’s judgment about where the product goes next, and they’re under no obligation to follow your priorities. Unless you have an agreement with all the details specified.
My Verdict: Choose a Vendor That Offers Custom Development Options
The software market has changed a lot in the last few years. Enterprise software (including wind turbine inspection software) has become much more configurable, mostly because customers demanded it.
Vendors that can’t accommodate a customer’s workflow lose the deal. APIs, native integrations, MCP connectors, and AI agents now cover a lot of the gaps that used to justify building your own. Fluix’s MCP connector, for example, lets a team ask an AI assistant questions about live inspection data, like overdue corrective actions or completion rates by crew, without anyone building a custom reporting layer.
It doesn’t solve every case. Ørsted runs its own internal analytics platform for fleet diagnostics and still licenses Shoreline Wind’s commercial simulation software for other work. A deliberate mix. EDF Renewables went the other way: it consolidated a scattered set of internal and third-party monitoring tools onto one commercial platform once maintaining the patchwork had turned into a project of its own. Neither company treated this as either/or. Most operators shouldn’t either.
And yes, I’ll say it directly: this is one of the reasons I believe in the product I represent. Fluix works with customers to fit the software to how they actually operate, instead of forcing everyone into the same setup. A few years ago, before configurable, API-connected software became normal, that promise was a lot harder to keep.
So if you’re weighing this decision, I’d skip “build or buy” as an abstract question. Ask whether the specific thing you need can be handled through configuration, an integration, or an AI agent, or whether nobody has built it before.The second group is smaller than it looks at first.
