---
title: "Build it yourself, or use Rig"
description: "What you actually have to build, maintain, and explain to every new hire if you DIY a data stack. Rig vs. building it yourself, Palantir, semantic layers, and the modern data stack."
canonical: "https://rig.so/vs-diy"
format: markdown
---

# Rig, vs. building it yourself

Two paths to the same outcome. Pick where you're starting from and we'll show you the honest comparison.

For startupsFor scale-ups

No warehouse yet? You need a data stack that's AI-native.

## The Modern Data Stack you'd build yourselves

Typical early-stage shape: ~10 SaaS sources, ~1 TB of data, one data engineer stitching it together. Numbers will vary; the shape doesn't.

Tool

What it does

Rough cost

Fivetran / Airbyte

Ingestion

$18–36k / yr

Snowflake / BigQuery

Warehouse

$10–25k / yr

dbt + a data engineer

Modelling

$150–200k / yr

Cube / dbt SL

Semantic layer

$10–25k / yr

Hightouch / Census

Reverse ETL

$10–24k / yr

Looker / Metabase

Dashboards

$12–36k / yr

Retool / Streamlit

Internal apps

$10–24k / yr

Custom MCP / glue code

AI interface

Engineering time

Notion / Confluence

Documentation (stale)

Salary tax

RLS, PII, audit, SOC2

Governance

Months of work

With Rig

One product, one contract. From $899 / mo self-serve. Live in a week.

[See pricing](https://rig.so/pricing)

## Three comparisons that come up most

### vs. Building the full MDS yourselves

The reality

Ten products, ten contracts, ten integrations. Six to nine months to first useful output, and a permanent maintenance tax once it's live.

What Rig does

One product. Ingestion, warehouse, modelling, hosting, AI, governance, audit, all in. First useful output inside a week. No data team needed to start.

### vs. A data consultancy build

The reality

Six-figure SOW, three to six months of discovery and stand-up. You inherit a stack you didn't choose and still have to run it.

What Rig does

Self-serve on day one, white-glove if you want it. We run the stack so your team owns the workflows, not the plumbing.

### vs. Hiring a data team to figure it out

The reality

First data hire spends six months picking tools before shipping anything. Second hire spends six months gluing them together.

What Rig does

Your existing operators ship the first apps. Hire a data person when you actually need one, not as a precondition.

[A cautionary taleThe horror story: what ships when nobody's governing the data. One vibecoded dashboard, one share link, twenty-three hours, hour by hour. And what RBAC changes.](https://rig.so/rbac-horror-story)

## Already mid-build? Talk to us about migrating off your DIY stack

Rig's AI agent handles the schema translation. The longer you wait, the more there is to migrate.

[Talk to us](https://rig.so/book-demo)[Try Rig first](https://app.rig.so/signup)

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- [This page as HTML](https://rig.so/vs-diy)
- [Site map for language models](https://rig.so/llms.txt)
- [API and agent documentation](https://rig.so/developers)