Comparisons
Orbit versus building it yourself
A warehouse, a BI seat, and a competent data engineer will out-perform any off-the-shelf tool eventually. Here is the honest maths on when that becomes true.
Ravi Menon
CTO
We get asked this by every technical buyer, and the honest answer is that building it yourself is often correct. It is worth being specific about when.
Where building wins
If your questions are genuinely unusual, if you already run a warehouse, and if you have an engineer whose job is analytics rather than someone doing it between sprints, building wins on flexibility and keeps winning. No product will model your business better than you can.
The break-even in our experience sits somewhere around the point where a dedicated analytics engineer is already on payroll. Below that line, the build is a side project competing with roadmap work, and side projects lose.
Where buying wins
Buying wins on the unglamorous parts: connector maintenance, retries, schema drift, permissioning, invoicing, and the tax paperwork behind a payout to someone in another country. None of that is hard. All of it is endless, and none of it differentiates your company.
The pattern that actually works
Most teams we work with end up doing both. Orbit handles the operational reporting and the money movement; the warehouse handles the deep analysis. The mistake is treating it as a single decision when it is really two.
Run your own numbers through Orbit.
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