[manishsharan]

Lets think this through !

The more moving parts you add to a system , the more points of failure and latency you will add to your system. Not to mention their impact on your marginal costs.

Some specialized services are not only essential but also replicating them in-house is beyond the expertise of a normal start-up. I would put Stripe, AWS/Heroku/Google, Github in this list.

Others are neither essential (mission critical ) nor rocket science to implement in-house. The start-up has to figure out if the impact of these non-essential services on the marginal costs is justified or not. And how long can you get away without spending money on nice-to-have services ?

[derickbailey]

good points that need to be considered in building your startup! it's a balancing act, i think, and that balance will change over time. for me, with an early stage of my service, being able to focus on my system's features and functionality is more important than the performance and customization that i would get out of writing some of these services myself. i imagine that later on in the lifecycle of this system, i will remove some of the 3rd party services in favor of my own code. but right now, being able to get features done quickly is more important than the monthly subscription costs. i don't expect everyone's situation to be the same, but i think it's a good place to start when you are bootstrapping your own apps / services