[simonsarris]

There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more. "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.

For context, the Homes for Ukraine refugee scheme cost 2-3 billion as of 2023. I can't seem to find an updated cost. This cost (from the article) was Palantir working for free for the first 6 months (could they have beat that, time wise?), then awarded 4.5m and 5.5m for two more 12 month terms, and now they're transitioning to something home-grown instead.

> The MHCLG [ Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government] said it initially needed a system which could be ready within days but, in seeking a "steadier service", later created an updated platform to meet the programme's longer-term needs and bring down costs.

I basically agree with the MHCLG's reasoning here. It's always worth at least experimenting to see if you can roll your own.

[ownagefool]

I worked on a small part of one of these back in around 2013 ( specifically managing beds ).

You were talking about a team of 5 cranking this out in about 2-3 months with some longer term part time involvement, with an annual cost of less than 1m and those people mostly all dellivering several product lines ( so actual cost is half or a quater ).

[stuaxo]

GDS has a framework that UK Gov departments have been following for some time to build sites with similar challenges to this for some time.

[InsideOutSanta]

> "Company tries to roll its own system and [saves / loses] money" is just a common story, one way or the other.

Governments build these kinds of systems ("collect data from a bunch of internal systems and show some public forms and have some internal processes for handling form submissions") all the time. When I worked for a local municipality, we built something like this every other month.

[kloop]

> There's not really enough info to know if this is just a coin toss or something more.

The difference is always having one or two devs who care. Every successful software project I've ever seen has had a few devs who care way more than is healthy