Dimension	Farna Control	Building in-house
What you are actually building	The factory floor is the product, maintained by us: connector layer, pipeline engine, HITL gates, hash-chained audit log, eval hooks, capability scoping, and cost controls. You configure it.	The same list, plus a permanent owner for it. Every one of those becomes your team's system to design, build, secure, and maintain.
Time to first governed pipeline	Hours to days: install the Community edition, connect one repository, run one pipeline.	Months. Until it exists, the thing you actually need - evidence about agent decisions - does not exist either.
Ongoing maintenance	Vendor-maintained upgrades, plus a public issue tracker and changelog you can read before you upgrade.	Permanent headcount: on-call, security patching, connector drift when upstream APIs change, and the roadmap work you are not doing instead.
Governance depth	HITL gates, evals, and a hash-chained audit log are first-class outputs of the platform, built in from the start.	Whatever you build. In practice the audit trail is the last thing built and the first thing to rot, because it is not on any user's critical path.
Cross-toolchain coverage	GitHub, GitLab, your tracker, and your model providers governed under one policy plane.	Every integration is its own project with its own owner and its own upgrade cycle.
Cost	One annual license per organization, flat regardless of seat count. Current price on /control/pricing.	Roughly one to two engineers, permanently, plus the opportunity cost. Compare that annualized against the license.
Control and lock-in	You run the instance and hold the data; it is BUSL source-available, so you can read and fork the code.	You control everything, which is the real argument for it. You also own everything, including the failure modes.
Vendor risk	You depend on a small, early vendor with a public repository, a changelog, and no telemetry by default (opt-in only).	You depend on nobody - provided the internal owner never leaves.
Evidence and provenance	The governed object is the delivery run, with observed facts, derived values, reported claims, and attested decisions kept distinct in the evidence record.	You define the evidence model and must maintain the distinction between observed, derived, reported, and attested facts yourself.
Controls and autonomy	Credentials, schemas, budgets, HITL gates and earned autonomy are enforced outside the model and can progress from approval to notification to autonomous execution.	You own the control design, implementation, and proof that it works as agents and integrations change.

The real cost of building

Building a software factory in-house looks cheap when you count only the engineering time. One engineer for a quarter, maybe two. But that is the optimistic case.

The ongoing cost is what kills the economics. One to two engineers permanently maintaining connectors as upstream APIs change, patching security vulnerabilities, running on-call, and writing the governance features that keep getting deprioritized because they are not on any user's critical path. Meanwhile the audit trail - the thing you actually needed - sits unfinished while the team builds the third connector rewrite.

Set that annualized cost against one flat annual license (price on /control/pricing), before counting the opportunity cost of the roadmap work you are not doing.

When building in-house is the right call

You already run a platform team with spare capacity.
Your governance requirements are unusual.
Procurement will not approve a small vendor.
You want full control of the roadmap and are willing to staff it.

When Farna Control is the right call

You need governance this quarter not next year.
Your pipeline already works and the audit gap is what needs closing.
You want one policy plane across tools.
You would rather buy the boilerplate and keep your engineers on your product.

Try Farna Control

Farna Control is self-hosted. You can evaluate it without talking to anyone.

Community edition (free) Team tier (see /control/pricing)

Questions? Open a discussion on GitHub.

Comparison table

The real cost of building

When building in-house is the right call

When Farna Control is the right call

Try Farna Control