NAYA vs Building In-House
A comprehensive comparison of building fintech infrastructure in-house versus using NAYA. Covers total cost of ownership, time-to-market, engineering resources, compliance readiness, and migration paths.
The Verdict
NAYA wins for the vast majority of fintechs and platforms that need production-ready financial infrastructure in weeks, want predictable costs, and prefer their engineers focused on customer-facing product. Building in-house only makes sense if financial infrastructure itself is your core product, you have 5+ experienced engineers to dedicate for years, and you can tolerate a 12–24 month path to a mature, compliant ledger.
The build vs buy fintech decision is one of the most consequential choices a fintech or embedded finance platform will make. It is not just a question of whether your team can build an in-house ledger system—it is about the total cost of ownership, time-to-market, risk, and where your scarce engineering talent creates the most value over the next three to five years.
On paper, building your own in-house ledger and reconciliation stack promises maximum control and customizability. In practice, most teams dramatically underestimate the total cost of ownership (TCO). A production-grade ledger requires double-entry integrity, idempotency, race-condition handling, immutable audit logs, backfills, versioned schemas, and robust reconciliation. For a typical build, 3–5 senior engineers will spend 12–18 months before you have a stable MVP, at a fully loaded cost of roughly $900k–$2.25M—before processing a single live transaction.
And the work does not stop at launch. In-house systems carry a permanent maintenance tax: 2–3 engineers spending most of their time on bug fixes, new product support, scaling work, and compliance changes, adding $400k–$900k per year. Over three years, the true cost of building fintech infrastructure commonly reaches $2–4M, not including the opportunity cost of what those engineers could have built instead. By contrast, NAYA converts this into a predictable operating expense, typically in the low six figures annually depending on volume, with maintenance, upgrades, and new capabilities included.
Time-to-market is equally critical. While an in-house ledger project often takes 12–18 months to reach production-grade reliability, NAYA customers usually complete initial integration in 2–4 weeks and go live in 4–8 weeks. That 6–12 month delta is time your competitors can spend launching products, iterating on pricing, and compounding user growth while your team is still hardening infrastructure.
Risk is another major dimension. Custom in-house systems are prone to "silent failures"—subtle reconciliation gaps, rounding issues, or race conditions that only surface during audits or customer disputes. NAYA provides compliance-ready infrastructure with SOC 2 controls, complete audit trails, and AI-powered reconciliation to detect anomalies early. Our platform is battle-tested in production at scale, so you inherit years of hardening and edge-case handling from day one.
There are edge cases where building in-house is justified: if you are literally building a ledger company, a new settlement network, or a bank with strict on-premise requirements and a large infrastructure team. For everyone else, the rational choice in the fintech infrastructure build or buy debate is to buy: use NAYA for the critical but undifferentiated plumbing, and invest your engineering cycles in the experiences your customers actually see.
| Feature | NAYA | Building In-House |
|---|---|---|
| Time to Production | 2–4 weeks to first integration; 4–8 weeks to full production✓ | 6–12 months for MVP; 12–24 months for production-grade |
| Initial Cost | Low implementation effort; usage-based pricing from day one✓ | $900k–$2.25M in engineering cost before launch |
| Ongoing Maintenance | Included in platform; no dedicated infra team required✓ | 2–3 full-time engineers for upkeep and enhancements |
| Engineering Headcount | 0–1 FTE for integration and product work✓ | 3–5 FTEs for build; 2–3 FTEs ongoing |
| Compliance/Audit Readiness | SOC 2-ready, full audit trails, controls built-in✓ | Custom audit logging; separate SOC 2 and controls program |
| Scalability | Battle-tested at high volume; elastic cloud-native scaling✓ | Tightly coupled to initial DB design; re-architecture often needed at 10x growth |
| Integration Flexibility | Modern API-first design; configurable flows and webhooks | Maximum flexibility but every integration built and maintained in-house |
| Long-term TCO (3 years) | Approx. $150k–$600k (volume-dependent, predictable SaaS)✓ | $2M–$4M+ including build, maintenance, and compliance |
NAYA is best for...
NAYA is ideal for fast-growing fintechs, B2B marketplaces, and SaaS platforms embedding finance that need to launch in weeks, not years, and want to avoid building and maintaining an in-house ledger system. It's a strong fit for CTOs and product leaders who see financial infrastructure as critical but non-differentiating plumbing, and who want battle-tested, compliance-ready rails with AI-powered reconciliation out of the box.
Building In-House is best for...
Building in-house can make sense for very large financial institutions with strict on-premise or bespoke regulatory requirements, or for companies where the ledger architecture itself is the core product (for example, a new settlement network or ledger-as-a-service platform). It also suits organizations with substantial, specialized engineering capacity and an 18–24 month runway before they need production value.
The Build vs Buy Decision Framework
Every fintech and embedded finance team eventually faces the build vs buy fintech question: should we build our own ledger and reconciliation stack, or adopt a platform like NAYA? Because the ledger is the source of truth for money movement, this decision has higher stakes than most infrastructure choices.
A practical decision framework starts with a few core questions:
- Is building a ledger and reconciliation engine a core differentiator for our business, or is it critical but undifferentiated plumbing?
- Do we have 3–5 experienced engineers we can dedicate for 12–18 months without slowing down our product roadmap?
- Can we afford the risk of discovering edge cases, compliance gaps, or scaling issues only after we are live with customers?
- Are there regulatory or deployment constraints (for example, strict on-premise requirements) that rule out external vendors?
For most modern fintechs, the honest answer is that customers do not care how your ledger is implemented—they care about fast transfers, intuitive dashboards, and rewards. That means the business value lies in product design, distribution, and partnerships, not in re-inventing ledger plumbing. In those cases, buying NAYA and focusing your engineering time on differentiation is the rational choice.
Hidden Costs of Building In-House
The headline cost of an in-house ledger project—"a few engineers for a few months"—rarely survives contact with reality. The long tail of requirements is where most of the cost and risk hides. Beyond basic debits and credits, a robust in-house ledger system must handle:
- Idempotency and retries so network glitches do not create duplicate transactions.
- Multi-currency support, FX rates, and rounding behavior that stands up to audits.
- Immutable audit logs with full traceability for every balance change.
- Operational tooling for support teams: search, dispute handling, adjustments, and backfills.
- Reconciliation against banks, processors, and internal systems, ideally with automation and anomaly detection.
Each of these adds complexity and ongoing maintenance. When you build in-house, you are also committing to keep up with evolving regulatory expectations, new payment methods, and new product lines. NAYA absorbs this complexity for you. With NAYA's operational ledger, you get a double-entry, audit-ready system designed for high-volume fintech use cases.
Our automated reconciliation engine reduces manual ops work and catches discrepancies early, without you having to build and maintain that logic yourself.
When Building Makes Sense
There are honest edge cases where building your own in-house ledger system is the right call. Being clear about these helps you make a confident decision and avoids vendor lock-in fears.
- You are building infrastructure as your core product. If you are a ledger-as-a-service company, a new blockchain, or a novel settlement network, the ledger is your IP. Owning every layer may be strategic, even if it is slower and more expensive.
- You have hard constraints that vendors cannot meet. Some large banks and regulated institutions must run everything on-premise, within specific jurisdictions, or on legacy stacks. In those cases, an internal build may be the only compliant option.
- You have surplus, specialized engineering capacity and long timelines. If you can dedicate 5+ experienced engineers for several years without impacting your roadmap, and you are comfortable with an 18–24 month path to maturity, building can be a strategic investment.
If these conditions do not apply, the cost, risk, and delay of building usually outweigh the perceived benefits of control. Buying NAYA gives you a battle-tested foundation and still leaves room for customization at the edges through APIs, webhooks, and configuration.
Migration Path from In-House to NAYA
Many teams start by building something simple in-house—often a set of tables in a relational database—and only later feel the pain of scaling, reconciliation, and audits. The good news is that you do not have to live with that decision forever. Migrating from an in-house ledger to NAYA is a well-understood path.
A typical migration looks like this:
1. Model alignment: map your existing accounts, balances, and transaction types to NAYA's operational ledger data model.
- 2. Historical import: bulk load historical transactions into NAYA so you maintain a complete, centralized audit trail.
3. Parallel run: route new flows through NAYA while keeping legacy systems in place, and use automated reconciliation to compare results and build confidence.
- 4. Cutover and decommission: once reconciled and stable, switch remaining products to NAYA and retire the in-house ledger.
NAYA's AI-powered reconciliation helps flag anomalies in transaction data during parallel runs and ongoing operations. If you want to explore what a migration could look like for your stack, you can see NAYA in action and walk through your architecture with our team.
Case Study: Time Saved with NAYA vs In-House
Consider a hypothetical Series B B2B payments platform planning to launch a new wallet product. The team estimates that building an in-house ledger and reconciliation engine will require four senior engineers for 12 months. At $250k fully loaded per engineer, that is a $1M investment before the product can safely go live, and it pushes the launch out by a full year.
Instead, they choose NAYA. Two engineers spend six weeks integrating NAYA's operational ledger and wiring it into their existing systems. The wallet launches in under two months instead of a year.
The impact is twofold. First, they capture 10 months of additional market time—enough to sign key anchor customers and iterate on pricing before competitors respond. Second, the four engineers who would have been tied up on ledger work instead ship new customer-facing features, improving activation and retention. Over three years, the cost of NAYA is a fraction of the internal build, and the company compounds the benefit of faster learning and higher engineering leverage.
This is the core of the build vs buy fintech decision: not just what it costs to ship infrastructure, but what it costs in delayed learning, slower iteration, and ongoing maintenance. For most teams, buying NAYA delivers faster time-to-value, lower long-term TCO, and a better use of your most precious resource—your engineers.
FAQ
When does it make sense to build fintech infrastructure in-house?
Building in-house is justified in a few specific scenarios. First, if financial infrastructure is literally your core product—such as a ledger platform, a new payment rail, or a settlement network—you need deep control and may accept the cost and time. Second, if you are a large bank or regulated institution with strict data residency or on-premise requirements that cloud vendors cannot meet, an internal build may be mandated. Third, if you have a large, specialized engineering team and multi-year timelines, and your requirements are truly unique and central to your differentiation, building can be reasonable. For most fintechs, however, the "not invented here" instinct is more emotional than economic, and buying a platform like NAYA is the better business decision.
What's the true cost of building a ledger system from scratch?
The true cost of building a ledger system goes far beyond the first version of the code. A realistic estimate includes: (1) Initial build: 3–5 senior engineers for 12–18 months, at $200k–$300k fully loaded per engineer per year, which is roughly $900k–$2.25M. (2) Ongoing maintenance: 2–3 engineers spending most of their time on fixes, new product support, and scaling work, adding $400k–$900k per year. (3) Compliance and security: SOC 2 audits, penetration testing, and security hardening, often $100k+ annually. (4) Scaling and re-architecture: at 10x–100x growth, many teams face a major refactor that can cost another several hundred thousand dollars. Over three years, a conservative total is $2M–$4M, not counting the opportunity cost of delayed features and market entry.
How long does it take to build vs buy fintech infrastructure?
With NAYA, teams typically complete a proof of concept in a few days and reach production in 4–8 weeks, depending on complexity and integrations. By contrast, building an in-house ledger and reconciliation stack usually follows this pattern: 3–6 months for a basic MVP, 12–18 months to reach production-grade reliability with full auditability, and 24+ months before the system is mature and battle-tested at scale. In-house timelines also carry more risk of overruns, because edge cases and regulatory requirements are often discovered late in the project.
What happens when in-house systems need to scale?
Scaling in-house ledger systems is where many teams hit painful limits. As transaction volume grows, naive database designs run into locking, contention, and performance bottlenecks. Maintaining strict consistency, high throughput, and detailed audit trails simultaneously is non-trivial. Teams often face a choice between slowing product development to re-architect the core ledger, or accepting growing technical debt and operational risk. NAYA is designed for scale from day one, with a cloud-native architecture that has already processed high volumes in production, so you avoid a disruptive re-platforming project just as your business is taking off.
Can we migrate from in-house systems to NAYA later?
Yes. Many customers start with a simple in-house SQL-based ledger and migrate to NAYA once they feel the pain of scaling, reconciliation, and audits. A typical migration involves: (1) mapping your existing data model to NAYA's operational ledger, (2) bulk importing historical transactions to preserve a complete audit trail, (3) running NAYA in parallel for new flows, and (4) gradually switching existing products over once reconciled. Depending on complexity, this can take 2–6 months and often costs less than a single year of maintaining your in-house system.