Every engineering leader eventually confronts the same question: should we build our own SAST scan pipeline or buy a commercial solution?
On paper, building seems attractive, full control, unlimited customization, and no vendor lock-in. In practice, the calculus is more nuanced: accuracy, developer experience, governance, and total cost of ownership will decide your winner.
The “build” case
A homegrown SAST setup offers deep customization. You can tailor rules to your stack, write linters that match your framework idioms, and tune severity to match your threat model. For languages with mature open-source analyzers, you can stitch together a pipeline that runs quickly in CI and emits findings into your issue tracker.
But the hidden costs add up. Signature development, rule tuning, language coverage, and keeping pace with new frameworks are ongoing commitments. False positives compound as your codebase evolves, and every framework update can invalidate assumptions embedded in your ruleset.
The “buy” case
Commercial SAST platforms amortize years of research across thousands of customers. That means wide language coverage, frequent ruleset updates, and ML-assisted de-duplication that spares developers from alert fatigue.
You also gain governance features out of the box: policy gates, audit trails, and role-based access. The tradeoff is flexibility. Vendor roadmaps may lag your stack. Pricing models can penalize rapid growth. And integrating with internal systems may require compromise or custom glue.
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aikido.dev
Decision framework
1. Criticality and compliance: If you operate in regulated environments (PCI, SOC 2, ISO 27001), you likely need auditable controls today, not in six months. Buying accelerates time-to-compliance, with policy gates and attestations you can hand to auditors.
2. Language and framework mix: A polyglot monorepo favors buying; a focused stack with strong OSS analyzers (e.g., Go+gosec, Python+bandit) can tilt toward building.
3. Engineering bandwidth: The best rule you will ever write is the one you actually maintain. If AppSec engineering is scarce, don’t spend it reinventing the base analyzer—spend it on threat modeling and secure patterns developers can adopt.
4. Developer experience: Scan speed, IDE hints, and noise levels determine adoption. If developers hate the tool, it won’t move risk. Evaluate developer-centric features first.
5. Tuning and explainability: You need transparent findings mapped to CWEs and clear fix guidance. If a vendor is a black box, you end up running parallel validation anyway.
A hybrid pathMany teams land on a hybrid: buy a platform for breadth and governance; build custom checks for your proprietary patterns. Use the vendor’s API to import allowlists, suppressions, and org-specific rules. Keep your internal rules under version control and ship them like code. The OWASP Code Review Guide and NIST SSDF can help define your baseline.
What good looks like
- Fast feedback: pre-commit/IDE hints for quick wins, full SAST in CI for depth.
- Policy gates: block on high-severity issues that touch regulated flows; warn on medium elsewhere.
- Ownership: findings auto-routed to the code owners of the affected paths.
- Metrics: track mean time to remediate, re-open rate, and false positive rate; adjust policies quarterly.
Cost reality checkAdd up engineering hours for ruleset tuning, CI maintenance, developer support, and audits. Then compare with vendor subscription plus integration work. The cheaper option is the one that reduces total risk per dollar, not just license cost per seat.
Where Aikido fits
Aikido’s SAST scanner emphasizes developer ergonomics and velocity, delivering actionable findings mapped to code owners and SLAs. If you build, you can still integrate Aikido as the governance and visibility layer, feeding in results from open-source analyzers while keeping a single source of truth for policy and reporting.
The takeaway is simple: build when your differentiation lies in custom rules and you can sustain the maintenance; buy when you need broad coverage, fast. Most organizations will do both, because security, like software, thrives on sensible composition.
