Self-Hosted vs. Managed Document Processing: When to Build and When to Buy

The Build-vs-Buy Question Nobody Answers Honestly Every developer who needs to process documents — extract data from PDFs, generate reports, transform images, convert between formats — eventually faces the same decision: build the pipeline yourself or pay someone else to run it. The internet is full of advice on this, and most of it is dishonest. Vendor blogs claim self-hosting is a maintenance nightmare. Open-source advocates claim managed services are overpriced rent-seeking. Neither side ackn