35 Build vs. Buy in the AI Era – Discussion Panel

📅 Wednesday, 28 October 2026, 18:00–20:30
📍 VirtusLab, Szlak 49, Kraków
"Why pay for that SaaS? I can build it with AI over the weekend."
Every team has heard this lately. AI coding tools now produce a working app in hours: a CRM, an internal dashboard, a ticketing tool, a Jira replacement. SaaS subscriptions get more expensive every year. Is it finally cheaper to build your own? Or is a weekend prototype only the start of years of maintenance, security patches and on-call duty that nobody planned for?
At this meetup we skip the slides and have a discussion. Practitioners who have tried both ways share what worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently today.

Topics we'll cover

The weekend prototype trap: Building is fast now. What about running, securing and supporting the app for the next 3 years?
Real cost: Seat-based SaaS pricing vs. cloud bills, AI tokens and the engineering time you never see on an invoice.
When SaaS still wins: Compliance, integrations, SLAs, and the features you only notice when they are missing.
When building wins: Workflows only your company has, data you can't send outside, and tools nobody sells.
Who owns it? Apps built by "citizen developers" with AI. Is this shadow IT 2.0, or the future of internal tools?
Will SaaS survive? If any team can build its own tools, what happens to the SaaS business model?

Panelists – to be revealed

Our panelists are experienced engineers who have written code for years. Now, with AI agents, they can get through a huge amount of work in a single weekend. We'll share the names in the coming days. You can RSVP now: it's free, and there's pizza.

Moderator: Maciej Gołaszewski – Cloud Engineer, AI enthusiast @ Virtuslab

Agenda

18:00 – Doors open
18:15 – Panel discussion
19:30 – Q&A with the audience
19:45 – Networking, pizza & drinks 🍕

Who should come

Anyone who has ever said "we could just build this ourselves", and anyone who had to maintain it afterwards. Engineers, platform teams, architects, and tech leaders are all welcome. So are the people who sign the SaaS invoices.

Good to know

Free entry, but you need a ticket. If you can't come, please free up your spot for someone on the waitlist.
Office rules: please sign the guest list when you arrive.
The event is in English.