AXIOM vs. Building Your Own: A Total Cost of Ownership Analysis

The build-vs-buy question comes up in every enterprise evaluation. Engineering leaders rightfully ask whether they could build something equivalent internally. The honest answer: yes, you could — but the total cost of ownership is typically 5-10x higher than deploying AXIOM, and the timeline extends from weeks to years. Consider the components: you need email integration (IMAP/SMTP/Graph API), calendar sync (CalDAV/Exchange), meeting recording and transcription (WebSocket audio pipelines, speech-to-text), a policy engine with Rego evaluation, a multi-tenant database with row-level security, an LLM routing layer with provider abstraction, a persistent memory system, voice telephony integration, and a web dashboard. Each of these is a significant engineering effort. Then multiply by ongoing maintenance: API changes, security patches, model updates, and compliance requirements. AXIOM's 8-phase, 22-week build plan represents thousands of engineering hours — and that is with a team that has already solved these problems.