Build vs. Buy: The Real Cost of DIY Certificate Automation

Your team just lost a weekend firefighting an expired certificate. On Monday, someone floats the idea: “Why don’t we just build our own certificate tracking system? How hard can it be?”

It’s a fair question. Your engineers are talented. You already have scripts that pull cert data from a couple of servers. A shared spreadsheet tracks expiration dates — sort of. Building an internal tool feels like it should be a quick win.

But here’s what nobody talks about at that Monday standup: the real cost of DIY certificate automation almost always dwarfs the sticker price of buying a dedicated solution. And the gap gets wider every year.

The “Quick Script” That Becomes a Full-Time Job

It usually starts innocently. Someone writes a PowerShell script that queries your Windows CA and dumps certificate data into a CSV. Another team member builds a cron job that checks SSL endpoints. Maybe there’s a Slack bot that pings a channel when something looks off.

These scripts work — until they don’t. And the moment you need them most is exactly when they fail.

The Project Management Institute found that 43% of IT projects go over budget, 49% come in late, and 14% fail outright. Internal tooling projects are no exception. That “two-sprint side project” has a nasty habit of becoming a permanent line item on someone’s workload.

Consider what a real certificate management system actually needs to do:

• Discover certificates across Windows CAs, Linux servers, and public-facing URLs
• Associate those certificates with the servers they live on
• Track expiration dates and send alerts at configurable intervals
• Generate reports for different stakeholders (IT ops, security, compliance)
• Integrate with help desk systems so tickets get created automatically
• Provide an API so other tools and workflows can pull data
• Handle multi-user access with role-based permissions
• Store documentation about certificate renewal procedures

Building each of these features isn’t impossibly hard in isolation. But building them all, making them reliable, keeping them maintained, and ensuring they actually work at 2 AM when a cert expires? That’s a different story entirely.

What DIY Certificate Automation Actually Costs

Let’s put some numbers on the table. These aren’t hypothetical — they’re drawn from industry research and what we’ve seen organizations go through when they attempt to build internally.

Development Costs

Building a meaningful internal certificate management tool requires dedicated engineering time. Industry estimates for building custom internal security tooling range from $250,000 to over $1 million in upfront development costs, depending on scope.

Even if you’re building something more modest — say, a monitoring dashboard with basic alerting — you’re looking at a minimum of two to three engineers spending several months on it. With the average Security DevOps engineer earning $143,000 to $175,000 per year, those months add up fast.

And that initial build is just the beginning.

The Maintenance Tax

Here’s where DIY gets expensive in ways nobody budgets for. Custom applications that serve critical functions need 40 to 80 hours of support each month — that’s a half-time to full-time engineer just keeping the lights on.

CIOs report that technical debt eats up 20-40% of their total technology value. Your certificate management tool won’t be immune to that. Operating systems get patched. APIs change. The engineer who built the original scripts leaves for another company, and suddenly nobody understands how the monitoring pipeline works.

This isn’t speculation. Large build projects overrun budget by 45% and deliver 56% less projected value than originally planned. Certificate management tools are no exception.

Opportunity Cost: The Expense That Doesn’t Show Up on a Spreadsheet

ActiveState’s 2025 research quantified something most teams feel but rarely measure: average of three certificate-caused outages over a 24-month period, with each incident costing approximately $2.86 million. It takes an average of 2.6 hours just to identify the root cause, plus another 2.7 hours to fix it.

And 88% of companies continue to experience unplanned outages from expired certificates.

These aren’t small companies with nobody watching the store. Google’s Bazel build system went down in December 2025 because an SSL certificate for bcr.bazel.build expired. Riot Games suffered a widespread outage in January 2026 when a certificate that was supposed to auto-renew from 2016 simply… didn’t. Microsoft Teams went dark for hours in 2020 because someone forgot to renew an authentication certificate.

If Google and Microsoft can miss a certificate renewal, what chance does your hand-built monitoring script have?

The 47-Day Cliff Is Coming

Here’s the factor that changes the entire equation: the CA/Browser Forum has approved a phased reduction of SSL/TLS certificate lifespans. Starting in March 2026, maximum certificate validity drops to 200 days. By 2029, certificates will expire every 47 days.

Think about what that means for a DIY system. A certificate that used to need renewal once a year will soon need renewal roughly eight times a year. Every integration, every script, every manual process — all of it multiplied by eight.

For an organization managing just 1,000 certificates, manual renewal processes could between $30,000 and $100,000 per year for enterprise-grade platforms. Many solutions, especially those designed for mid-sized IT teams managing hundreds (not tens of thousands) of certificates, cost significantly less.

CertMS, for example, starts at $2,500 per year for monitoring up to 100 active certificates, with tiers scaling to $8,500 per year for up to 5,000 certificates. That’s a fraction of what even a single engineer would cost, and you get:

• Automated discovery across Windows CAs, Windows and Linux servers, and URLs
• Certificate-to-server association so you know exactly what’s affected when something expires
• Custom reporting — both ad hoc and scheduled — delivered to your inbox
• Help desk and webhook integrations that create tickets or trigger workflows automatically
• Built-in documentation linked directly to certificates for renewal procedures
• A full API that lets you integrate with anything else in your stack

The ROI Math Is Straightforward

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact studies have consistently shown that automated certificate management delivers $965,000 in renewal labor costs over three years through automation.

Even at a smaller scale, the math works. If your team spends 10 hours per month tracking and renewing certificates manually — a conservative estimate for most organizations — that’s 120 hours per year. At a fully loaded cost of $75 per hour for IT staff time, you’re spending $9,000 annually on manual work that a $2,500 platform handles automatically. And that doesn’t account for the risk of missed renewals causing outages.

When Building Makes Sense (and When It Doesn’t)

To be fair, there are legitimate scenarios where building internally makes sense:

• Extreme customization needs. If your certificate management requirements are deeply intertwined with proprietary systems that no vendor supports, custom development might be warranted.
• Very small scale. If you’re managing fewer than 10 certificates and they rarely change, a calendar reminder might genuinely be enough. For now.
• Regulatory constraints. Some industries have data sovereignty requirements that limit vendor options (though cloud-native solutions with dedicated instances, like CertMS’s per-customer EC2 deployment, address this).

For most IT teams managing 30 or more certificates, buying wins decisively. You get a solution that’s battle-tested, continuously updated, and costs less than the engineering time you’d spend building something half as capable.

The Hidden Advantage: Someone Else’s Full-Time Focus

There’s a benefit to buying that doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet. When you purchase a certificate management platform, you’re getting a product built by people who think about certificate management every single day. They’re tracking industry changes like the 47-day lifespan reduction. They’re building integrations before you need them. They’re handling edge cases your team hasn’t encountered yet.

Your team’s full-time focus should be on running your business infrastructure, not maintaining a certificate monitoring tool. Let a dedicated platform handle the plumbing so your engineers can focus on work that actually moves the needle.

Making the Decision

If you’re weighing build vs. buy for certificate management, ask yourself these questions:

For most teams, the answer points clearly toward buying. The cost is lower, the risk is lower, and the capability is higher. That’s a rare trifecta in IT purchasing decisions.

Ready to Stop Building and Start Monitoring?

CertMS was built specifically for IT teams that need to track certificates without the overhead of enterprise-priced platforms or the fragility of homegrown scripts. With pricing starting at $2,500 per year, dedicated per-customer infrastructure, and a setup process that takes minutes instead of months, it’s the kind of buy decision that pays for itself before the first renewal cycle.

See how CertMS works and stop spending engineering hours on a problem that’s already been solved.

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