The Temptation to Build
"How hard could it be? We just need a dashboard with some charts and alerts."
This is how it starts. And for engineers, building is always tempting. It feels productive, it feels like progress, and it gives you complete control. But the build-vs-buy decision for agent management tools deserves careful analysis.
The True Cost of Building
Development Time
A "simple dashboard" for agent monitoring requires:
- Backend API for agent telemetry (1-2 weeks)
- Database schema for metrics, logs, and events (1 week)
- Frontend dashboard with real-time updates (2-3 weeks)
- Alerting system with multiple channels (1-2 weeks)
- Cost tracking and budget management (1-2 weeks)
- User authentication and team features (1 week)
- Testing, bug fixing, and polish (2-3 weeks)
Total: 10-14 weeks of engineering time. At average engineering costs, that's $50,000-$100,000+ before you factor in ongoing maintenance.
Ongoing Maintenance
A custom dashboard isn't a build-once project:
- Bug fixes: New agents, new edge cases, new bugs
- Security updates: Dependencies, authentication, data protection
- Feature requests: Every team member wants "just one more thing"
- Scaling: As your fleet grows, your dashboard needs to keep up
Industry estimates put maintenance at 20-30% of initial build cost per year.
Opportunity Cost
The engineers building your dashboard aren't building your product. This is the biggest hidden cost — and the hardest to quantify. Those 10-14 weeks of engineering could have been spent on features that generate revenue.
What You Get with ClawHQ
ClawHQ gives you a production-quality agent management platform in minutes:
- 5-minute setup: Connect agents with one command each
- Proven at scale: Built for fleets from 1 to 1000+ agents
- Continuous improvement: New features every month, no maintenance on your end
- Expert-designed: Dashboard patterns refined through thousands of users
- Cost: Free to $49/month for most teams
The Decision Framework
Build When:
- Agent management IS your core product (you're building a competitor to ClawHQ)
- Regulatory requirements prevent external data sharing
- You have truly unique requirements no product supports
- You have spare engineering capacity (rare)
Buy When:
- Agent management is a supporting function, not your core business
- You want to move fast and focus on your product
- You value your engineering team's time
- You want production-quality tooling without the maintenance burden
The Hybrid Approach
Some teams start with ClawHQ and build custom integrations on top:
- Use ClawHQ for monitoring, alerting, and fleet management
- Build custom views that pull data from ClawHQ's API
- Integrate ClawHQ data into existing internal dashboards
This gives you the best of both worlds: a production platform with custom extensions where you need them.
Real Team Experiences
"We spent 6 weeks building a custom dashboard, then replaced it with ClawHQ in an afternoon. The custom one was always behind on features and broke every time we added a new agent type." — Engineering lead, Series A startup
"ClawHQ's free tier gave us better monitoring than our 3-month custom build. We should have started there." — Solo founder
Making the Switch
If you've already built a custom dashboard and are feeling the maintenance pain, switching to ClawHQ is straightforward. Connect your agents, migrate your alert rules, and redirect your team to the new dashboard. Most migrations are complete in under a day.
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