As manufacturers embrace smart, connected products, one foundational decision can shape the success—or struggle—of the entire initiative: Should you build your IoT solution in-house or buy an existing platform?
This build vs. buy decision is about more than budget. It’s about control, speed, scalability, and long-term flexibility. In the high-stakes world of IoT manufacturing, choosing the wrong approach can result in delays, technical debt, or limitations that hold your product—and your business—back.
Let’s explore how manufacturers can approach this decision strategically, and why more teams are turning to hybrid frameworks like CallBox to power connected product development.
When Building Makes Sense
Building a custom IoT solution gives you full control. From infrastructure to integrations, you can tailor the system to match your exact product specifications and existing tech stack. This approach is often best suited for manufacturers with highly specific needs—such as integrating with legacy equipment, handling proprietary data flows, or enabling complex user experiences.
Owning your codebase means you’re not tied to vendor limitations. You can evolve the product on your terms, ensuring the solution grows with your business rather than around someone else’s roadmap. However, the path to building your own platform is resource-intensive. It typically involves longer development timelines, higher initial costs, and the need for a dedicated engineering team to support deployment and ongoing maintenance.
For organizations with strong internal capabilities—or a trusted software partner—building a platform from the ground up can result in long-term ROI. But it’s not always the fastest or most flexible way to launch.
The Advantages—and Limits—of Buying
Buying an existing IoT platform or white-labeled product offers speed. You can often get to market more quickly by leveraging pre-built infrastructure, user interfaces, and device connectivity features. For manufacturers looking to validate a connected product idea or launch a minimum viable product (MVP), this route can provide the foundation you need with minimal development effort.
Off-the-shelf solutions also shift the burden of maintenance, hosting, and security to the vendor, freeing up your team to focus on core product innovation. But these benefits come with tradeoffs. Most commercial platforms are built for general use and may lack the customization needed for your industry, hardware, or data workflows. As your use case grows more complex, licensing costs may increase and platform limitations may hinder future innovation.
If flexibility, data ownership, or deep integration is important to your business, buying a turnkey platform might not be sustainable in the long run.
The Hybrid Solution: Build on a Flexible Foundation
Many manufacturers are choosing a third option—a hybrid model that blends the speed of buying with the customization of building. Rather than starting from scratch or being locked into someone else’s ecosystem, a flexible framework allows you to accelerate development without giving up control.
CallBox, Mutually Human’s IoT development framework, was created to meet exactly this need. It’s designed to help manufacturers bring connected products to market faster using a flexible foundation that spans embedded systems, cloud infrastructure, and mobile applications—allowing full customization across the entire technology stack. With CallBox, you don’t have to choose between rigid platforms and complex, from-scratch builds.
You get a solid technical base—including device firmware, secure communication, data ingestion, cloud infrastructure, and user interface components—paired with the freedom to tailor the experience to your product and users. CallBox leverages AWS for scalability and performance, while giving you full ownership of your code and data, eliminating vendor lock-in.
Making the Right Call for Your Connected Product
As you evaluate the best approach for your smart product or IoT initiative, consider the following:
- How unique are your product requirements compared to what’s available off the shelf?
- Do you have—or want to build—the internal capacity to maintain your own IoT platform?
- How quickly do you need to launch, and how much iteration do you anticipate post-launch?
- What level of control do you need over data, integrations, and security?
- Is long-term scalability a key part of your business model?
- How important is it to deliver a polished, professional user experience that can also adapt and evolve with your product over time?
Every IoT journey is different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. But with the right framework in place, you can reduce time to market, lower risk, and ensure your technology supports—not limits—your vision.
CallBox was built to give manufacturers the best of both worlds: a head start on development and the freedom to build a solution as unique as your product. Whether you’re connecting industrial machinery, enabling predictive maintenance, or launching a new smart device, Callbox provides the foundation you need to go from prototype to production with confidence.
Looking to accelerate your IoT initiative without compromising flexibility or ownership?
Let’s talk about how CallBox can support your connected product strategy.
