6 articles
Thomson Reuters spent $40 million putting its archive inside its own AI model, and the final training run cost under $450,000 because it built on a model anyone can download. Part 5 of Buy vs. build closes the series with what that means for a 12-person practice: the knowledge Thomson Reuters put inside a model, your firm puts on top of one, in a page of written-down rules. Two moves, one engagement, this month.
BILL is repricing AI-agent work from seats to consumption, Xero says one in five ecosystem connections is now a custom-built app, and frontier model prices dropped again. Part 4 of Buy vs. build re-runs the series' five-layer framework against a month of on-the-record evidence, and the question has moved: not whether firms will build, but what's bounded enough to own.
Whether your firm should build or buy was never about the app. It's about whether you can supply the harness and the janitor yourselves. Part 3 of Buy vs. build closes the series with the build-readiness test, the packaging premium, and one question per layer to ask before any renewal.
Basis says it takes responsibility for the first pass of your clients' tax returns. OpenAI, four days earlier, refused to claim authorship of work its own model did and took responsibility only for its correctness. Both sentences are about who is answerable, and only one of them means it.
Per-client and per-user app fees levy a decision tax accountants have paid since QuickBooks Desktop gave way to subscriptions. Part 2 of Buy vs. build reads the pricing wrapper the way an accountant should, as a risk contract: who carries the token volatility, who holds the repricing option, and what to watch as usage-based pricing arrives.
June's conferences said buy and build in the same breath, and agreed most accounting apps are LLM wrappers. But the intelligence was never the whole product: every app subscription bundles five layers, and the wrapper critique prices only one. Part 1 of Buy vs. build unbundles what an app actually sells you.
