Performance Monitoring: Build vs. Buy

Your team agrees: you need performance monitoring. The question is whether to build a custom solution or buy an existing tool. Both approaches have merits — here's an honest comparison.

Option 1: Build Your Own

What You'd Need to Build

A basic monitoring system requires:

1. Scheduled scanner — runs Lighthouse/PSI on a schedule
2. Data storage — stores historical results
3. Dashboard — visualizes trends
4. Alerting — sends notifications on regression
5. Multi-page support — monitors multiple URLs

Technical Implementation

// Simplified: Run Lighthouse programmatically
const lighthouse = require('lighthouse');
const chromeLauncher = require('chrome-launcher');

async function runAudit(url) {
  const chrome = await chromeLauncher.launch();
  const result = await lighthouse(url, {
    port: chrome.port,
    onlyCategories: ['performance'],
  });
  await chrome.kill();
  return result.lhr;
}

// Run on a schedule
const cron = require('node-cron');
cron.schedule('0 */6 * * *', async () => {
  const urls = ['https://example.com', 'https://example.com/pricing'];
  for (const url of urls) {
    const result = await runAudit(url);
    await saveToDatabase(result);
    await checkAlerts(url, result);
  }
});

Build Costs

Component	Development Time	Maintenance
Lighthouse runner	1-2 days	Ongoing updates
Chrome/Puppeteer infrastructure	2-3 days	Server costs + reliability
Database + API	2-3 days	Scaling, backups
Dashboard UI	3-5 days	Feature requests
Alerting system	1-2 days	Alert fatigue tuning
Multi-user auth	1-2 days	Security updates
Total initial	10-17 days	—
Annual maintenance	—	20-40 hours/year

True Cost of Building

Cost	Amount
Developer time (build)	$10,000-25,000
Developer time (maintain)	$3,000-8,000/year
Server/infrastructure	$50-200/month
Chrome instance hosting	$50-100/month
Total Year 1	$12,200-29,600
Total Year 2+	$4,200-11,600/year

Build Pros

• Complete customization
• No vendor lock-in
• Integrates exactly with your stack
• No per-seat pricing
• You own the data

Build Cons

• Significant upfront investment
• Ongoing maintenance burden
• Chrome/Lighthouse updates can break things
• No support team
• Features compete with product roadmap

Option 2: Buy a Tool

Available Options

Tool	Price	Key Features
BadPageSpeed	$0-79/mo	Automated monitoring, alerts, simple dashboard
Calibre	$75-500/mo	Budgets, CI integration, detailed dashboards
SpeedCurve	$20-500/mo	Synthetic + RUM, competitive analysis
Datadog RUM	$1.50/1K sessions	Full-stack, session replay
New Relic	$0.25+/GB	APM integration, free tier

Buy Costs

Cost	Amount
Tool subscription	$360-6,000/year
Setup time	$500-2,000 (one-time)
No infrastructure	$0
No maintenance	$0
Total Year 1	$860-8,000
Total Year 2+	$360-6,000/year

Buy Pros

• Immediate setup (minutes, not weeks)
• No maintenance burden
• Professional support
• Regular feature updates
• Battle-tested reliability
• Focus your team on your product

Buy Cons

• Monthly cost
• Less customization
• Vendor dependency
• Data stored externally
• May include features you don't need

Decision Framework

Build When:

• You need deep integration with internal tools
• You have unusual monitoring requirements
• You have dedicated DevOps/platform team capacity
• Privacy/compliance requires self-hosted data
• You're monitoring 1,000+ URLs with custom logic

Buy When:

• You want to start monitoring today
• Your team should focus on product development
• You need 1-100 URLs monitored
• You want alerts and dashboards without building them
• Maintenance burden is a concern

The Hybrid Approach

Many teams use both:

• Buy a monitoring tool for ongoing automated checks
• Build custom CI/CD integration (Lighthouse CI) for pre-deploy checks
• Use free tools (PageSpeed Insights, WebPageTest) for ad-hoc debugging

Our Recommendation

For most teams, buy first, build later if needed. Start monitoring today with an affordable tool, and only build custom solutions when you outgrow off-the-shelf options.

Related Reading

• Automated Performance Testing in CI/CD Pipelines
• Monthly Performance Audit Checklist
• How to Set Up a Performance Budget

BadPageSpeed starts free with a generous tier. Set up in 2 minutes.

Start monitoring for free →