---
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

Pick where you're starting from and see how Rig compares.

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. Your numbers will differ, but the stack's overall shape is similar.

Tool

What it does

Rough cost

Fivetran / Airbyte

Ingestion

$18k to $36k / yr

Snowflake / BigQuery

Warehouse

$10k to $25k / yr

dbt + a data engineer

Modelling

$150k to $200k / yr

Cube / dbt SL

Semantic layer

$10k to $25k / yr

Hightouch / Census

Reverse ETL

$10k to $24k / yr

Looker / Metabase

Dashboards

$12k to $36k / yr

Retool / Streamlit

Internal apps

$10k to $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 stack yourselves

The reality

About ten separate tools and contracts. Six to nine months pass before the first useful output, and the maintenance never stops once it is live.

What Rig does

Rig is one product covering ingestion, warehouse, modelling, hosting, AI, governance and audit. The first useful output comes inside a week, and you do not need a data team 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 can spend its time on the workflows.

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

The reality

Typically the first data hire spends six months choosing tools, and the second spends six more connecting them.

What Rig does

Your existing operators ship the first apps. Hire a data person when the work calls for one.

[A cautionary taleWhat ships when nobody governs the data: one vibecoded dashboard and one share link, traced hour by hour over twenty-three hours, and what RBAC would have changed.](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, and we can scope the move on a call.

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

---

- [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)