Build vs buy
One developer costs about $194,000 a year
That is before compute, storage and model calls. Below is the arithmetic, every input sourced, and how many developer hours a year an API subscription has to save to cost less than building.
The arithmetic
What one developer costs
Salary
$135,980
Median annual wage for software developers, May 2025. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook
Fully loaded
$194,257
Salary ÷ 0.700. In June 2026, wages and salaries were 70.0% of private-industry employer compensation costs; benefits were the other 30.0%. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation
Per hour
$93.39
Fully loaded cost ÷ 2,080 paid hours (40 hours × 52 weeks, our assumption).
Break-even
Hours a subscription has to save
Every $10,000 a year
107 hours a year
about 2.1 hours a week of one developer
A quarter of one developer
$48,564 a year
520 hours of the same fully loaded cost
Half of one developer
$97,129 a year
1,040 hours of the same fully loaded cost
Scope
What the build would have to cover
- Ingest the article stream every hour and keep it runningMethodology
- Group articles into Stories and code each Event against a published taxonomy, with actors, places and evidence linksEvent taxonomy
- Resolve people, organizations and places to stable identitiesMethodology
- Join the registries, filings and open datasets you also needData & sources
- Serve it as an API, MCP tools, scheduled Monitors and bulk filesAPI catalog
Your numbers
Run it with your own costs
Fully loaded cost: $194,257 a year.
Enter an annual price to see the break-even hours.