--- title: "Agents Made Software Cheap to Build, Not Cheap to Run" canonical: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/issue/54/vision/article/61628/agents-made-software-cheap-to-build-not-cheap" publication: "TinyFish" publisher: "TinyFish" language: "en-US" guide: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/llms.txt" author: "Sable Whitford" author_url: "https://current.tinyfish.ai/team/201" issue: 54 section: "vision" section_name: "Vision" published: 2026-11-05 word_count: 294 source_links: 2 --- # Agents Made Software Cheap to Build, Not Cheap to Run *By [Sable Whitford]()* *November 5, 2026* [Read on the website]() About a third of organizations told [McKinsey](https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai) this year that they skipped buying at least one piece of software because AI coding agents could build it instead. That's self-reported, and "at least one" could mean a single internal dashboard. The follow-up nobody asked is the one I care about: how many of those tools are still running, and who gets woken up at 3 AM when the damn thing falls over? Writing the code was always the cheap part. The expensive part is the years after: security patches, upgrades, outages. One large GitHub study found that autonomous agents raised code changes about 240%, while finished releases rose only 30%. Agents sped up writing far more than shipping. So maybe the build-versus-buy line moves. Owning code gets nearly free. What you'd still pay a vendor for is someone else carrying the pager, the alert that drags a human out of bed. **Before you skip the purchase:** - **Name the person on call.** One human gets the alert. "The team" is not a name. - **Price year two.** Hosting, upgrades, security patches and the occasional outage all add up. The build is usually the smallest cost. - **Rebuild only what you use.** Copying the features you need costs far less than cloning the whole product ([Malo, Yu & Qiu](https://arxiv.org/html/2610.30307v1)). - **Check whether AI runs inside it.** If the tool calls an AI model every time someone uses it, that bill never ends. - **Be wary with official records.** Small tools with one clear job favor building. Systems that hold the company's official data, especially regulated data, favor buying. - **Split it.** Build the thin edges and buy the core. - **Bring it to renewal.** Proof that you could build it gives you leverage with the vendor. ## More - [Vision — Issue 54]() - [Issue 54]() - [Publication guide]()