Three surveys measure companies building over buying

Enterprises skipped software purchases they could build themselves at a 32% rate, among more than 1,700 respondents, according to McKinsey's State of AI 2026 survey. Software vendors now compete with buyers who've already tried building the product themselves.

The rate reaches 41% among technology companies and 39% among healthcare payers and providers, per CIO Dive's coverage of the survey.

Temporal's State of Development report, published two days earlier from 554 engineers, found 92.3% had tried building an app they'd previously have bought. Of those, 25.6% called the impact substantial.

Retool's Build vs Buy report, from February, had already put 35% of enterprises at having replaced a SaaS subscription with custom software. Three firms, three question designs, three populations, seven months apart, all pointing the same direction.

None of the three surveys measure the cost of running what gets built once the person who built it moves on. Skipping a purchase is easy to count. Whether the built version keeps costing less than the subscription is a separate question no one has data on yet.