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Riptide vs. building it yourself
An in-house ad platform gives your team control over its design and operation. It also makes you responsible for auctions, protocol support, tenant isolation, billing, and maintenance. Riptide provides those services with APIs and plugins for the behavior you need to customize.
| Area | Building it yourself | Riptide |
|---|---|---|
| Auction | Design and maintain eligibility, pricing, pacing, and tie-breaking | Direct campaigns, programmatic bids, and deals share one auction |
| Protocol support | Implement the required standards and test each partner integration | OpenRTB 2.6 and VAST 4.2 rendering, with supported versions and limitations in the standards guide |
| Tenant isolation | Design access controls and test isolation between customers | Tenant-scoped access and database row-level security |
| Reporting and billing | Build metering, reporting, and billing, then reconcile their records | Reporting and billing use a shared event stream |
| Agent access | Build tool discovery, authentication, permissions, and audit records | MCP tools with tenant permissions, limits, and approval controls |
| Operations | Run the infrastructure and maintain the entire application | Choose a managed plan or a private deployment under a commercial agreement |
When to build in-house
Building can make sense when your auction or delivery requirements are central to your business and existing platforms cannot support them. Your team needs the capacity to maintain the system, handle incidents, and keep partner integrations current.
Before deciding, test the requirements that matter most against Riptide's extension interfaces and protocol support. Include integration work and ongoing operating costs in both estimates.
Review your build requirements
Share your expected traffic, ad formats, and the systems you need to connect. We can help you choose a plan and identify the setup work.