Build your own editor, or buy Beefree SDK?

Tell us a little more about your team’s needs, and we’ll help you estimate what it will cost you to build and maintain an editor.

What best describes the editor experience you’d like to bring to your users?

Do you need your editor to be operable by AI agents?

What kind of product are you building?

Tell us about the type of product you’re looking to embed the editor into.

Do you have high requirements for scalability, security, availability, and compliance?

Will you build on an open-source editor framework, such as GrapesJS?

What’s your team setup like?

Tell us a little more about the people who would be working on your editor integration.

How much faster does AI make your team’s work?

There’s a lot of disagreement on this topic. So what’s your take?

What’s important to you after you launch?

The initial editor integration has an end date. Maintenance doesn’t. Share how important the following items are for you.

Emails must look great across all email clients As email clients evolve, I want to make sure designs still look great in all inboxes, including Outlook.
The editor stays secure and up to date CVEs, framework and dependency upgrades, browser changes.
Bugs are addressed quickly We want to react to bugs or customers’ requests quickly.
The editor is improving over time, based on customer feedback We want to implement new features based on changing customer needs—or changes in the industry.

Beefree SDK plan

Total cost of a home-built editor
Total cost of using Beefree SDK

to launch when you build yourself
when you build with Beefree SDK

Total cost

Let’s take a closer look at the cost breakdown.

Build it yourself
Initial build Maintenance AI tools
Maintenance never ends.
Beefree SDK
Subscription Integration and maintenance

Cumulative cost by year

Would you like to talk to a human about the pros and cons of building your own editor?

Reach out!
Assumptions

Here are the defaults that power the calculation. Change any of them to better meet your team’s situation.

Starting point: What would it take to rebuild the Beefree SDK?

We’ve taken a look at the Beefree SDK code base and the effort we’ve invested into building the parts that make it work (the front end, the rendering engine, the backend) and what it would take to rebuild it all today. Our data shows that this would require about 1,800 developer weeks — that’s the number we’ll use as a starting point for this model.

Adjusting effort to the scope and complexity of your build

Your share of the starting point depends on what the editor does and who uses it. Add-ons for AI agents and high requirements are added on top, and the total is capped at 100%.

Editor experienceInternal tool (% of full effort)A product that I sell (% of full effort)
Minimalist
Basic
Cutting edge
An SLA, high availability and compliance cost about the same whatever the editor does, so this is added rather than multiplied.
Applies to every editor experience, for an internal tool and a product that I sell.

Building on open source

Using an open-source framework instead of building from scratch can make it faster to build your own editor. Here are the factors the model applies to account for that.

Cost of maintaining your editor post-launch

Keeping your editor up-and-running requires resources. The model calculates maintenance as a % of the original build effort — because a simpler product is simpler to maintain.

Constantly adjust for changes in Gmail, Outlook, dark mode, etc.
Security fixes, dependency and framework upgrades, browser changes.
Bugs, customer support, incidents.
Their users will ask for more: AI features, new blocks, changes in the industry.

Team size

More people don’t divide the months in proportion: coordination eats part of each new person. Every pair of people is a line of communication to keep in sync (3 people have 3, 8 have 28, 15 have 105), and new people need time to learn the code while the people who teach them build less (Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, 1975). Each engineer adds less than the one before:

  • Engineers 1–3 count as 100% each
  • Engineers 4–6 count as 90% each
  • Engineers 7–10 count as 80% each
  • Engineers 11–15 count as 70% each

So 5 engineers count as 4.8, 8 as 7.3, 12 as 10.3 and 15 as 12.4. The calculator goes up to 15 engineers: a large build runs as two teams, and past that more people stop shortening the schedule. Every engineer is still paid for every month, so time lost to coordination is part of the cost. Our estimate.

AI-assisted coding

AI divides the effort of the build and of maintenance by one factor: a team that is 2× as fast needs 1 ÷ 2 = 50% of the people-months. The factor is for the whole project: AI writes code and tests much faster, but product decisions, review, QA, checking emails in real inboxes and running a service in production speed up much less.

  • About 20% faster (1.2×): what controlled studies on real work measure, roughly 0.8–1.3×. Google, 96 engineers on an enterprise task, about 21% less time, ×1.27 (Paradis et al., 2024). Microsoft, Accenture and a Fortune 100 company, 4,867 developers with GitHub Copilot, 26% more completed tasks, ×1.26 (Cui et al., 2025). METR, 16 experienced open-source developers on their own repositories, 19% more time, ×0.84 (METR, 2025).
  • Twice as fast (2×): a team that has reshaped its way of working around AI agents. Our estimate.
  • 3.5× as fast: the claims heard on stage and online, kept so you can see that number too. No measurement we know of backs it.

There is no reliable public measurement of AI speed-up on whole projects yet. If your team measures a different factor, enter it below.

Optional. When filled in, it replaces your answer to “How much faster does AI make your team’s work?”
About the price of the top flat plans of AI coding tools, for the build and for maintenance. Heavy agent use paid per token can cost more, but AI tools stay a small share next to the people.

Beefree SDK integration

Based on our experience, most customers dedicate 1 FTE to integrating the Beefree SDK. Integration takes about 2 weeks for a minimalist editor, 4 weeks for a basic one and 8 weeks for a cutting-edge one. Ongoing maintenance of the SDK requires 0.1 FTE.

How the model works

  1. Starting point: rebuilding 100% of the Beefree SDK = about 1,800 developer weeks, without AI.
  2. Initial build effort = that starting point × your share of it: the grid value for your editor experience and who uses it, + the AI-agent points if the editor must be operable by AI agents, + the high-requirements points if you have them. The share is capped at 100%.
  3. On open source, the initial build is multiplied by the open-source factor for your editor experience. Maintenance stays based on the from-scratch effort.
  4. AI divides the build effort by the speed factor you chose for how much faster AI makes your team.
  5. Time to launch = build effort ÷ the effective number of engineers (each engineer adds less than the one before; see Team size). Maintenance starts at launch and runs to the end of the 3 years.
  6. Maintenance per year = the from-scratch build effort × (rendering + security and updates + bugs and support + new features, each a % per year) ÷ the same AI speed factor. Items marked “Not important” are left out.
  7. All people are priced at the annual cost of one engineer you entered. AI tools are charged per engineer, per month, at a flat rate.
  8. Beefree SDK = the plan’s subscription + integration + ongoing maintenance, priced the same way.

Not included: template migration (both options need it), recruiting time, overrun risk, the roadmap the build team isn’t working on, and product management, design and QA: the model counts engineers only. All but the first favor buying.