Build vs buy for live chat on a marketing site

Teams often estimate “two weeks for a chat bubble.” That covers UI. It rarely covers visitor tokens, domain locking, rate limits, encrypted bot credentials, signed outbound webhooks, and a durable message log.

Buy when the job is “visitor asks, team answers where they already work.” Build when chat is the product itself — routing rules, knowledge bases, and multi-brand suites are a different scope.

CanWeChat is intentionally narrow: one site, four reply destinations, a small widget. That is the buy case for small teams, not a replacement for Intercom-scale support orgs.