Build vs. Buy: Evaluating the Architecture of a .NET Reporting Stack
"We just need to generate a few PDFs and maybe export to Excel."
It sounds like a two-week feature. In practice it’s one of the more expensive architectural commitments a .NET team makes — because you’re not adding a feature, you’re starting to build a reporting SDK, and almost nobody decides to do that on purpose.
The path is always the same. A team adds a lightweight C# report layer, writes some rendering code, ships v1. Then the requirements arrive — templates, permissions, localization, Excel fidelity, compliance formats, batch generation, customer-specific layouts. The "simple reporting feature" becomes a subsystem with its own roadmap, its own bug queue, and its own scaling problems. By the time the foundation is clearly wrong, you’re usually too deep to swap it without a painful project.
This is a total-cost-of-ownership decision dressed up as a feature decision, and it’s far cheaper to get right at...
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