The Hidden Cost of Building Your Own
Building a video recording solution sounds straightforward. It never is.
What starts as a two-week sprint turns into months of work because once you move to production you need to keep up with various edge cases and browser bugs you’ll discover, browser bugs that you can’t replicate, browser changes, security updates for your infrastructure, storage downtimes, peak periods.
Your best engineers — the ones you hired to build your product — end up maintaining a video stack instead.
If You Build It You Own The Risk
When you build your own video solution, you’re not just writing code. You’re committing to owning it — forever. Every bug fix, every API deprecation, every iOS and browser update, every new device your users buy becomes your team’s responsibility.
With Pipe Platform, you’re buying back that time. Your engineers stay focused on what makes your product unique. We handle everything else.
Comparison Table
Here’s a comparison between build your own versus choosing the Pipe Platform.When you build your own video solution, you’re not just writing code. You’re committing to owning it — forever.
| Build Your Own | Pipe Platform | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first recording | Weeks to months | Minutes |
| Engineering cost | Ongoing — your team’s time | Fixed and predictable |
| Browser & device compatibility | Your problem to maintain | Handled for you |
| Reliability & uptime | On you to monitor and fix | Built-in, battle-tested |
| New features | Scoped, prioritized, scheduled | Shipped continuously |
| Opportunity cost | High — diverts core team | Zero |
How important is your time?
Your team’s time is your most valuable resource. Don’t spend it reinventing infrastructure that already exists.
Get started with Pipe Platform →Peaks, Handled
Our platform uses a smart queue and lanes mechanisms to handle load during peak recording events. Your use cases revolves around recording students all taking an exam at once or async video interviews during a short window our platform is built to accept the flurry of new recordings but throttle the processing.
Post-Processing, Handled
Every browser and device records video differently — different formats, different codecs, often incompatible with each other. Pipe handles all of it automatically.
Storage, Handled
We offer complimentary storage for up to 1 TB of data on our own Amazon S3 and Scaleway buckets. Separately, we support all popular storage solutions including pushing to Amazon S3 or compatible services like Cloudflare R2, FTP, FTPS, SFTP, Dropbox and Box. If the storage provider or server has downtime, or you mistakenly revoke the S3 user permissions our mechanism will try again for about 72 hours. Detailed logs are available for each push attempt.