Many of us, myself included, will be predisposed to controlling our own SDLC, largely because of bad experiences with vendors. Personally I've had vendors shutting down a product that was core to our offering with basically no notice, performing poorly but not accepting responsbility, just milking T&M, and just straight up lying.
The problem is, all those outcomes exist with hiring your own developers, and it's really difficult to mitigate unless you yourself are a strong developer who can run projects and teams and look beyond what people are telling you.
Reality is, it's impossible to answer the question without really getting more information. Specifically around what you spend on outsourcing / licensing, what the feature set you're going, what the budget for the new team would be, and what the expected outcomes and timelines are.
Without the context though, some quick fire opinions.
- You probably at least want the dry powder. i.e. the person making the outsourcing decisions should at least have the technical accume to bring it in-house if required. If they're not a person that could, then outsource is the only decision they can realstically make, then they'll tell you it's the right decision even when it isn't.
- You need someone mature. If they just want to build everything from scratch always because of some personal bias, you'll end up amassing tech debt in areas where there were limited risk / benefit. Developers will 100% tell you you need to building things because it's interesting to them, even when you don't really need it.
- If you're going to do this with any near-term success your first hires are really key, and they likely won't be cheap. I see people debating brining in a team vs a CTO, but both strategies fail if the quality isn't there. Figure out how to validate quality.
I was CTO of from ~25m to ~£75m ARR UK Point-of-Sale org with ~100 tech employees. Those roles are hard to find. This sounds like a great opportunity. Lots of folks will likely do the hard sell. Good luck.