Is your Internal Developer Platform (IDP) an asset or a liability?
Internal Developer Platforms are hyped and discussed a lot these days but often articles only mention different technical approaches or deny any value at all to platforms for smaller businesses. I think it is time to look at internal developer platforms from a non-emotional and non-technical perspective:
Is your internal developer platform an asset or a liability?
Let’s be honest, building and maintaining an internal developer platform is neither a part-time project that you build up on a few mild summer evenings nor is maintaining and supporting it something that can be done by any cheap and inexperienced engineer that did not build the platform in the first place.
Building and maintaining an internal developer platform takes time and money.
What does an IDP promise?
Internal Developer Platforms promise faster developer onboarding, standardized deployment processes, improved security and compliance, and — ultimately — fewer bottlenecks between developers and infrastructure. When executed well, they enable teams to ship features faster, more reliably, and with fewer distractions.
But the keyword here is “when executed well“. That promise comes at a significant cost.
The real cost of building an IDP
Let’s break it down. To build even a basic IDP, you need:
- Senior DevOps engineers or platform engineers
- A product mindset (yes, your platform is a product!)
- A UI/CLI experience that developers will actually use
- Ongoing support, upgrades, documentation, and training
In most companies, building such a platform requires 2–4 full-time engineers for 6–12 months, with ongoing maintenance costing 1–2 full-time roles permanently. That’s easily $300,000–500,000/year, not counting opportunity costs.
And this is not a one-off investment. Kubernetes versions evolve. Developer needs change. CI/CD standards shift. The platform you built in 2023 might feel outdated in 2025. So if you’re not prepared to maintain this like a product, you’re setting yourself up for technical debt and frustrated teams.
How do you know if it’s paying off?
To answer whether your platform is an asset or a liability, you have to measure it like any other investment.
What are you saving or gaining through the IDP?
- Faster onboarding? How much time do new devs save?
- Shorter time to deploy? Are releases actually quicker and safer?
- Less support burden on DevOps? Has manual ticket volume gone down?
- Fewer errors and rollbacks? Do metrics support this?
If you’re not actively tracking these things, your IDP is running on belief — not evidence.
And if you’re building one “because everyone else is,” that’s not a strategy. That’s peer pressure.
Common pitfalls (signs your IDP is becoming a liability)
- Built by infra teams without UX thinking
Devs don’t use it, or worse, build workarounds. - Underfunded and understaffed
One DevOps engineer trying to support 10 teams? That’s a burnout story. - No success metrics defined
If you don’t measure cost vs. benefit, you’re flying blind. - No product owner
A platform without roadmap and prioritization becomes a Frankenstein of half-built ideas.
When Is an IDP a true asset?
Your IDP is an asset when:
- You have multiple teams with repeated infra patterns
- You’re investing in it like a real product, with dedicated resources
- You’re tracking metrics: onboarding time, deployment frequency, lead time, support ticket volume
- Developers actually use it, praise it, and would complain if you took it away
It’s also an asset when it enables scale. If your company is growing and you need to abstract infra complexity to empower developers, the IDP is not a luxury — it’s a survival tool.
Alternative paths
Before you build your own IDP, ask:
- Can we start with commercial tools? (e.g. Humanitec, Port, Cortex)
- Can we buy and customize, instead of building from scratch?
- Are we solving a real problem, or just trying to look cool with a YAML abstraction layer?
Sometimes, a simple combination of Terraform modules, good CI/CD pipelines, and internal documentation does the job just fine — especially for smaller companies.
Final thoughts
Internal Developer Platforms are not inherently good or bad. They are tools. They can be phenomenal enablers or time- and money-sucking liabilities.
Whether your IDP is an asset or liability depends on your context, discipline, and honesty.
- If you treat it like a real product, resource it properly, and measure success, you can gain a real competitive edge.
- If you build it as a side project with no plan or ownership, it will fail — quietly at first, then loudly and expensively.
Before building or expanding your internal platform, ask yourself the hard questions. It might save you a year of sunk cost.
Related articles
So you really want to start your own IDP? You might want to check out my articles: