Mycel vs Building it yourself
The honest comparison, since it's what most people actually do.
What Building it yourself is good at
You know your domain better than any framework. A prompt, an API call and a cron job gets a demo working in a weekend, and for a while that's the fastest path — genuinely. Most good AI service businesses start exactly this way.
The actual difference
The demo isn't the hard part. What takes the next six months is the boring half: credential custody, tenant isolation that actually holds, an approval flow people will use rather than switch off, an audit trail a client's accountant accepts, scheduling that doesn't double-fire, and somewhere for your customers to log in. Mycel is that half, open source, so you keep the part that's actually yours — the judgment.
Side by side
| Building it yourself | Mycel | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to demo | A weekend | An afternoon |
| Time to second customer | Weeks of isolation work | A new project |
| Audit trail | Logs, probably | Hash-chained, verifiable |
| Credential custody | Env vars, probably | Encrypted vault, never in the sandbox |
| Customer portal | A month | Included |
| You own | Everything, including the plumbing | The judgment. The plumbing is Apache-2.0 |
Choose Building it yourself
- You're validating whether anyone wants it
- One customer, one workflow, no compliance conversation yet
- The domain is so unusual that generic primitives fight you
Choose Mycel
- The second customer arrived and isolation stopped being theoretical
- Someone asked for a DPA or an audit trail
- You're spending more time on plumbing than on the service
Other comparisons: Temporal, LangGraph, Zapier & n8n, CrewAI & AutoGen