Every .NET SaaS team hits this moment: customers start asking for reports and dashboards. Do you build it yourself or use an embedded reporting solution?
The "build it" answer feels right at first. You know SQL, you know your data model, you have a charting library picked out. But there's a pattern I've seen repeatedly: teams underestimate the ongoing maintenance cost and end up with a reporting system that consumes 20–30% of a developer's time indefinitely.
What You're Actually Building
A production reporting system for a multi-tenant SaaS requires:
- Query engine — filter, sort, group, aggregate
- Multi-tenant data isolation — tenant-scoped at the query layer (not just UI)
- Chart rendering + configuration UI
- Dashboard layout engine (if you want multi-widget dashboards)
- Saved report persistence + permissions
- PDF/Excel export
- Scheduled email delivery
Year 1 estimate for a custom build: 460–780 developer hours (~$57,500–$97,500 at market rates).
Year 2+: ~20% of a senior developer's time for maintenance. That's $40,000–$60,000/year ongoing.
The Opportunity Cost
Every sprint spent on reporting infrastructure is a sprint not spent on your core product.
When to Buy
For most .NET SaaS products: buying an embedded reporting solution is the right call. Dotnet Report ships as a NuGet package with the full stack included — report builder, dashboards, charts, scheduling, export, multi-tenant isolation. Integration takes 1–2 weeks.
When to Build
Building makes sense if:
- Reporting IS your core product
- You have highly specific domain requirements no commercial solution fits
- You have dedicated reporting engineers
For everyone else: the buy case is strong.
Full cost breakdown: dotnetreport.com/blogs/build-vs-buy-reporting-net-saas/
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