Build vs Buy: The true cost of moderation infrastructure
Before you decide to build your own moderation pipeline, understand what it really costs.
Build your own
Time to MVP
6-12 months
Engineering cost
$1-2M
at $200k/yr fully loaded per engineer
Maintenance
Ongoing forever
50% of eng time on moderation infrastructure
On-call
24/7 rotations
OpenModeration
Time to MVP
5 minutes
docker-compose up
Engineering cost
$0
AGPL v3, free forever
Maintenance
Zero
Community maintains, you deploy
On-call
Not needed
Year 1 cost breakdown
| Cost item | Build | OpenModeration |
|---|---|---|
| Initial engineering (3-8 engineers, 6-12 months) | $500k - $1.5M | $0 |
| Ongoing maintenance (0.5-1 FTE) | $150k - $400k/yr | $0 |
| Security incidents & outages | $20k - $80k per incident | $0 (community) |
| Infrastructure (servers, DB, Redis) | $500 - $5K/mo | Your existing infra |
| Compliance updates per regulation change | $30k - $100k | $0 (built-in) |
| On-call rotations | $30k - $60k/yr | $0 |
| Year 1 total | $1,000,000+ | $0 |
Estimates based on US-based senior engineering at $200k/yr fully loaded. Your mileage may vary.
What you get vs what you build
| Feature | Building in-house | OpenModeration |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-provider support | 3-6 months to integrate 2 providers | 9+ providers included |
| Unified response format | Custom normalization per provider | Standardized out of the box |
| Smart routing | Build routing logic from scratch | Config-based routing |
| Admin dashboard | Build React/Vue dashboard | Included, ready to use |
| Action engine | Build rules engine + webhooks | Built-in rule builder |
| Social connectors | Integrate each platform individually | Facebook, YouTube, Discord included |
| Audit trail | Design logging system from scratch | DSA-compliant audit logs |
| Batch moderation | Build async processing + webhooks | Native batch API |
| API key management | Implement auth + rate limiting | Built-in key management |
| Docker deployment | Containerize and orchestrate | docker-compose up |
The hidden costs of building in-house
On-call rotations
Who gets paged at 3am when the pipeline goes down? In-house means your team owns the pager for yet another critical system.
Provider API changes
Providers change schemas, deprecate models, update taxonomies without warning. Every change is a fire drill for in-house systems.
Compliance drift
DSA, OSA, and other regulations evolve. In-house teams must track legislation and implement audit trail changes. OpenModeration is built DSA-compliant from day one.
Infrastructure scaling
Your moderation needs grow faster than expected. In-house systems that handle 100 req/min break at 10,000 req/min. OpenModeration is designed for horizontal scaling.
When to build vs when to buy
Build when...
- Moderation is your core product differentiator
- You have 3+ engineers to dedicate for 6+ months
- You need proprietary moderation algorithms
- You have ex-regulators on staff for compliance
Buy OpenModeration when...
- You want moderation working today, not in 6 months
- Your engineering team should focus on your product
- You want multi-provider flexibility without lock-in
- You need DSA compliance without hiring compliance experts
- You want to keep your data on your infrastructure
Stop building. Start moderating.
Deploy OpenModeration in 5 minutes with Docker. Free, open source, no lock-in.