The real cost of in-house PII redaction
A competent in-house build is three to four engineers for six to nine months — plus infrastructure and the security work most teams forget to budget for. Then you maintain it forever.
Use this when your team asks "can't we just build this internally?"
What an in-house build actually costs (6–9 months to v1)
01 · Engineering
$300–400K
3–4 senior engineers × 6–9 months, fully loaded — salary, benefits, equity, overhead.
02 · Infrastructure
$20–30K
AWS dev, staging, and production environments across the build window. Multi-region adds more.
03 · Hidden cost
$50–100K
Third-party security audit and compliance certification work — the line item most internal projects skip until renewal.
Total to v1
$400–500K+
Before you've redacted a single record in production. And you maintain it forever.
Build vs buy — side by side
The real question isn't "can we build this?" — it's "is this our edge?" Every engineer-month spent on PII plumbing is a month not spent on the product your customers actually pay you for.
Talk to Treza