CyberTwin vs DIY
Where each one wins on the buying decision.
The hardest comparison to make on paper. Your in-house security team can absolutely produce a priced architecture recommendation, a compliance scorecard, and a board-ready PDF. The question isn't whether they can — it's whether their time is the highest-leverage use of the headcount you already have. If your security lead is spending 40 hours stitching together vendor brochures, sourcing prices, and reformatting compliance matrices, the engine output replaces that 40 hours for a fraction of the loaded cost.
Side by side
The dimensions that move a buying decision.
| Dimension | CyberTwin | DIY |
|---|---|---|
| Cost (cash) | Assess $4,800/yr. Operate $14.4K/yr. Program $36K/yr. | No direct cash — but the loaded cost of a senior security hire's time is $150–250/hr. |
| Time to first deliverable | Signup to PDF in a single session. | 20–80 hours of in-house work, typically over 2–6 weeks of calendar time. |
| Sourcing rigor | Every recommendation cited; methodology + sourcing log public. | Depends on the analyst; sourcing rigor varies engagement to engagement. |
| Compliance scoring | 24 frameworks scored at once against your actual environment. | You score the frameworks you target; cross-framework crosswalks are manual work. |
| Vendor prices | Annual prices sourced from vendor pages and Vendr benchmarks, refreshed quarterly. | You do the vendor outreach; pricing is what they quote you. |
| Refreshability | Regenerate the assessment any time the environment changes. | Each refresh is another round of in-house analyst time. |
| Board PDF | Generated automatically from the engine output. | Your analyst writes it; format quality varies. |
Hourly loaded-cost range sourced from BLS + Glassdoor + Levels.fyi reporting for senior security architects in major US metros, 2026.
Pick CyberTwin when
The CyberTwin-shaped use case.
- Your senior security hires' time is your most expensive line item and you want to redirect it from analysis to execution.
- You're running this analysis annually or more often; the recurring cost makes the loaded hourly rate hard to justify.
- You want every recommendation cited to a public source, so any auditor or board member can verify the math.
- You need the deliverable in days, not weeks — the engine produces the PDF in your first session.
Pick DIY when
The in-house-shaped use case.
- Your team has the bandwidth and the analysis is itself a development opportunity for a junior security hire.
- Your environment is so unusual that vendor-catalog recommendations would need substantial in-house translation to map onto your reality.
- You've already paid for the in-house analyst's time and the marginal cost of one more analysis is zero.
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