[scarface74]

If one person came up with a complex algorithm and another person told me that this must be an issue that many companies face and there must be a service that specializes in this and the first thing they would do is to look for a third party provider. I would hire the second person unless we were the company specializing in address look up.

There is nothing worse than a developer who doesn’t know the difference between which problems are part of the business domain that they are suppose to be writing code for and problems that other people have already solved.

And for this particular use case, I happen to know about CASS certified software. SmartyPants is $1000/month for unlimited lookups. Why would I waste company resources on writing that myself? The yearly cost is less than a month’s fully allocated salary for a senior developer in a major metropolitan city.

[Jemaclus]

Yep, exactly. :)