The Technology Landscape Is Changing

Back in 2005, building an application often required dozens of specialized team members. Today, a small team—or even a single individual—can put together an entire IT solution at lightning speed. To be clear, this doesn’t refer to low-code or no-code tools that merely help someone send emails. We’re talking about a full-fledged system, complete with logic that solves complex problems in an enterprise environment.

Despite significant advancements, many vendors still secure substantial venture capital to deliver "black box" tools to their customers. These tools often generate large profits without consistently innovating to address each customer's unique needs. Echelon One aims to change this approach by collaborating with customers to tailor solutions and continuously drive innovation that supports their specific requirements.

In this article, we’re going to dispel the myths that are used to propagate the necessity of a vendor solution. This isn’t to say that building partnerships with specialized teams is off the table; it simply means businesses should prioritize betting on their own capabilities first.

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The Myths of Vendor Solutions

Myth #1: Scalability

In today’s cloud-driven era, scaling can be as straightforward as running your code on a serverless service like AWS Lambda or by leveraging batch processing with AWS Batch. Your engineers likely already know how to do this, or they can get up to speed over a weekend. Moreover, most problems don’t require a massive nuclear-scale solution; you’re likely not handling billions of parallel executions, so scalability is often less of a priority.

Echelon One takes care of scaling for you, allowing you to focus on your logic. If you prefer to use your own scaling solution, Echelon One can integrate with that as well.

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Myth #2: Security

Some vendors will have you believe that your engineers will hardcode access keys or create an insecure edge. In reality, most internal applications handling business problems don’t even extend beyond the corporate boundary. Secret management is commonplace and hassle-free now, thanks to services like AWS Secrets Manager. Critically, your organization’s own security measures protect your internal apps.

Many vendors operate in a multi-tenant setup, mixing your data with other customers within the same cloud accounts. Most don’t accept customer-managed encryption keys, which surrenders even more control over your data. Combine that with SDLC policies you can’t fully govern and potential breaches from edges you don’t manage, and security suddenly looks much more reliable in-house.

Echelon One exclusively deploys single-tenant solutions for customers, and we let you bring your own encryption materials. Any code that runs against your environment is reviewable or created by your team.

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Myth #3: Development Time and Efficiency

This is my personal favorite to debunk. First, let’s address the elephant in the room: LLMs (Large Language Models) have made life far easier for engineers. No one is sifting through Stack Overflow for individual calls anymore; entire logic sections can be generated and iterated on at once. Additionally, when your team builds solutions for your own environment, they develop a deep familiarity with specific needs. This drives consistent innovation and keeps your solution evolving and relevant.

Meanwhile, businesses often perform lengthy bake-offs and third-party reviews of vendor solutions—sometimes taking months or even a quarter. This timeframe can easily exceed the time it would take to develop internally.

The real advantage of building in-house surfaces when it’s time to adapt. You’re no longer constrained by a vendor’s roadmap for essential integrations or new features. Your team can iterate immediately.

Echelon One provides embedded AI to help you quickly build and refine your logic. Because customers create and maintain the system logic, you’re not waiting on us to adopt the next big thing.

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Myth #4: Integrations

Many slick sales pitches boast about a product’s vast array of pre-built integrations. In practice, most of these integrations aren’t needed, and the ones that are often come with strict, opinionated configurations that may not align with how your environment operates. Businesses can end up making painful compromises to fit these vendor tools into their workflows.

In reality, you can create integrations with most modern services using just a few lines of code, and these are directly supported by the vendors you’re integrating with.

Echelon One is unopinionated. Teams can build only the integrations they truly need, and any code you write for an API or SDK would be fully supported by its vendor. We never obscure your logic in any way.

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The Business Advantages of Owning Your Solutions

Advantage #1: Complete Flexibility and Control

When you build in-house, solutions are tailored precisely to your business requirements. You use the specific data and integrations necessary for a custom fit. As requirements evolve, your roadmap and sprint tasks can pivot accordingly. Vendors, meanwhile, offer generalized solutions with roadmaps that could be a year (or more) away from deployment.

Echelon One simply provides the wrapper that executes your logic. We streamline your evolving needs by letting you focus entirely on the logic layer.

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Advantage #2: Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

Investing in a third-party tool means you depend on that vendor for the functionality they provide. Your team might have to learn proprietary interfaces or languages that won’t translate elsewhere, and your budget must adapt to ever-changing bills. Most importantly, you’re betting on the vendor’s continued existence.

Echelon One doesn’t require any proprietary language. Code you contribute to our system can be reused however and wherever you want.

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Advantage #3: Cost Control

With homegrown solutions, your business stays in the driver’s seat regarding costs and resource allocation. You’re not subject to high markups that keep a third-party vendor profitable. A real-world example is an enterprise backup solution for one of our customers that costs $300 per month—instead of the $50k per month quoted by a leading vendor.

At Echelon One, our pricing reflects our disruptive stance in the market. We’re a fraction of the cost of most tools, and return on investment can be realized within the first day.

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Advantage #4: Deepening In-House Expertise

By developing solutions in-house, your team gains a deeper understanding of your cloud infrastructure and spending patterns, enhancing their skill set. Engineers learn, adapt, and innovate around APIs, data management, and automation, which boosts productivity and sparks new ideas.

Echelon One enables your teams to become builders for the parts that matter - focusing on logic instead of scaffolding and other low value technical overhead.

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Final Thoughts

While vendors can shorten certain initial efforts and reduce immediate labor, they also introduce lock-in, additional monthly fees, and less control over critical processes. By running your solutions in-house, you empower your engineers to design highly customized workflows, deepen their domain expertise, and ensure every iteration meets your organization’s security and governance standards.

At Echelon One, our mission is to form genuine partnerships with our customers. We want businesses to bet on their own teams, tackle challenges in-house, and grow their expertise from within. Our commitment is to deliver a platform that shifts the trajectory of technology partnerships and places the roadmap squarely in the customer’s hands.