#35 Build vs. Buy in the AI Era – Discussion Panel

📅 Wednesday, 28 October 2026, 18:00–20:30
📍 VirtusLab, Szlak 49, Kraków
"Why pay for that SaaS? I can build it with AI over the weekend."
Every team has heard this lately. AI coding tools now produce a working app in hours: a CRM, an internal dashboard, a ticketing tool, a Jira replacement. SaaS subscriptions get more expensive every year. Is it finally cheaper to build your own? Or is a weekend prototype only the start of years of maintenance, security patches and on-call duty that nobody planned for?
At this meetup we skip the slides and have a discussion. Practitioners who have tried both ways share what worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently today.

## Topics we'll cover

***The weekend prototype trap: **Building is fast now. What about running, securing and supporting the app for the next 3 years?
** *Real cost: **Seat-based SaaS pricing vs. cloud bills, AI tokens and the engineering time you never see on an invoice.
*** When SaaS still wins: **Compliance, integrations, SLAs, and the features you only notice when they are missing.
** *When building wins: **Workflows only your company has, data you can't send outside, and tools nobody sells.
*** Who owns it? **Apps built by "citizen developers" with AI. Is this shadow IT 2.0, or the future of internal tools?
** *Will SaaS survive? **If any team can build its own tools, what happens to the SaaS business model?

## Panelists – to be revealed

Our panelists are experienced engineers who have written code for years.

**Marcin Wozniak **– Multi-Cloud Architect

Marcin Wozniak is a Multi-Cloud Architect with two decades of experience across systems, cloud platforms, and security. Combining architectural strategy, engineering discipline, and a strong focus on the human element—team readiness, culture, and governance, he brings a grounded perspective to the AI era, assessing whether teams are genuinely equipped to own, secure, and sustain AI-built solutions versus buying SaaS.

**Wojciech Kocjan **– CTO and co-founder

AI-focused engineer, CNCF Ambassador, and long-time cloud native practitioner with over 20 years of experience in IT and more than a decade working with public clouds. I’m passionate about how AI changes developer experience, infrastructure automation, and the way engineering teams build software. My work sits at the intersection of AI-enabled workflows, Kubernetes, containers, secure software supply chains, and declarative infrastructure. I’ve worked with startups as well as large enterprise companies, building scalable cloud native systems and helping teams automate, ship, and operate software more effectively. Beyond engineering, I care deeply about community. I’ve been co-organizing a local cloud native meetup in Kraków, Poland, as part of the CNCF community. In my free time, I enjoy flying drones, solving puzzles, reading, and exploring new ideas.
Stay tuned, the next panelists will be announced soon.

**Andrzej Amghar **– Staff Platform Engineer, IBM

Platform Engineer with 10 years of professional experience in IT. Passionate about the Platform as a Product approach and reducing cognitive load for engineering teams. Experienced in both private and public cloud offerings. Leveraging AI to enhance the developer experience by building tools and creating documentation that enables both humans and machines to write better code.

**Grzegorz Rożniecki **– Director of Engineering, Akamai

Director of engineering at Akamai, where he leads observability and platform engineering teams. He joined 11 years ago to help build a distributed Java time-series database, which became an internal SaaS relied on across the company for years. Today, his teams are building its successor: managed observability services based on open-source VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Loki, and Tempo. That journey shaped how he sees build vs. buy: as a product question. Even an internal tool has to compete with the SaaS alternative, and without product thinking it rarely wins.

**Moderator: **Maciej Gołaszewski – Cloud Engineer, AI enthusiast @ Virtuslab

## Agenda

*** 18:00 **– Doors open
** *18:15 **– Panel discussion
*** 19:30 **– Q&A with the audience
** *19:45 **– Networking, pizza & drinks 🍕

## Who should come

Anyone who has ever said "we could just build this ourselves", and anyone who had to maintain it afterwards. Engineers, platform teams, architects, and tech leaders are all welcome. So are the people who sign the SaaS invoices.

## Good to know

*Free entry, but you need a ticket. If you can't come, please free up your spot for someone on the waitlist.

• Office rules: please sign the guest list when you arrive.
  *The event is in English.