Space tourism booking
Build Apogee yourself, or buy it?
Worth saying plainly: sometimes building it yourself is the right call. If the product is your business and its shape is unlike anything here, build it. This page is for the other case — when you need a working space tourism booking system and the interesting part of your work starts after it exists.
- Hours of build
- 160
- At full time
- 5.3w
- Cost to build
- ₹5,60,000
- Cost to buy
- ₹16,999
Building it yourself costs about ₹5,43,001 more — 32.9× the price of the licence — and you don't have it for another 5.3 weeks.
Line by line.
| Build it | Buy it | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to something usable | 5.3 weeks of full-time work | Same day, once the files transfer |
| What you're paying for | Your hours, or someone else's | ₹16,999, once |
| Edge cases | Found in production, by your users | Already found and handled — see below |
| The data model | Two or three rewrites before it settles | Settled, and running in production |
| Design | A separate hire, or it looks like a side project | Every screen designed and built |
| Ownership | Yours | Yours — full source, no obfuscation, modify freely |
| Risk of it not working | Real, and only discovered late | Open the live demo before you pay |
Where the 160 hours actually went.
Not the CRUD. Screens are quick. These are the parts that took real time to get right, and the parts a rebuild would have to solve again from scratch.
- Six-step booking wizard with per-step zod validation and a Server Action confirm
- Keyboard-operable capsule seat map with premium, crew and sold seats
- Static shell + streamed inventory on Next.js 16 Cache Components
- URL-synced catalogue filters, quick-view modal and three-way compare
- Original generative SVG art — no stock imagery to license
Build it if…
- The system itself is the thing you're selling
- Your model is genuinely unlike anything in the catalog
- You have the months, and the months are cheap
- Learning the domain deeply is part of the point
Buy it if…
- You need it working this month, not this quarter
- The value you add starts after the system exists
- You'd rather spend the budget on customers than on scaffolding
- You want a codebase to learn from as much as ship
free · 40 checks
The Ship-It Checklist
40 things that break in production, collected from 24 systems that shipped. Secrets, builds, data, money, email, SEO — the things that actually broke, not the generic advice. Sent as one email, no drip sequence.