Build vs. Buy (Boss Edition)

Or, why use Fracas when my developers could build their own cross-platform sync mechanism instead

Executive Summary

Fracas has a piece of code that your developers can drop straight into your product that will allow your users to magically sync their settings, content, purchases, etc. between their devices. Even if some of those devices are iPhones and others are Android tablets. It just works, and it’s either free or cheap depending on how many users your app has.

Your developers may try to convince you to let them build the exact same thing from scratch. Don’t let them. Buy our thing instead.

The Long Version

Let’s say you have an app that you’re developing for both iOS and Android. A common situation is that your user will download the app on her iPad, do some stuff, create some documents or purchase some downloadable content. She’ll then install the same app on her Android phone, and would like all that stuff to magically appear in the app. But it doesn’t. That makes her sad, so she leaves a one-star review of your app, which makes you yell at your developers to fix it so that it does what this user wants.

Your developers like to build things. That’s what you pay them for, so fair enough. But they tend to like to build lots of things that have already been built before, because it’s fun to build things, and because it gives them the chance to work with all sorts of new technology.

Right now your developers would like to build a custom syncing library that will let you pull those user settings across, somehow invoking The Cloud, and involving a bunch of technologies with silly names that sound like they may have come from characters in The Hobbit. It’ll take a couple days to bang this out, they say. A week tops.

Now you have some sharp guys working for you, and they’re probably right. They’ll have something ready to go next week. But here’s the thing. Think for a second how much those guys cost you each day, apiece. Now take a quick look at our [Pricing Chart].

You see, we’re a company that solves this exact problem. Probably better than even your engineers could. It’s all we do. And chances are we’ll only cost you $50/month. And that’s only if your app takes off and manages to escape our generous Free Tier.

Do a quick back of the envelope calculation and see how many *years* you could try us out for with what it would have cost for that “couple days” of work to build something similar in house. And that’s before you factor in the extra server that you would have needed to provision, host, and maintain to keep it running (they told you about that part, right?)

At the end of the day, you’re in the business of shipping your App, not building fiddly syncing stuff. Fortunately for you, we *are* in that other business. Nice to meet you. I hope you find we’re a good fit for what you’re building. Don’t hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.