Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Germany average consulting rates, run around 100 euros per hour. https://www.freelancermap.com/blog/freelance-market-study-ge... Plus some management expenses, and it turns into around 1000 euros per delivery day for a FTE. Then we can go to the companies doing high level consulting and pull some notches still.
Sure, there's ample opportunity for everyone in the industry to throw money into the sea. The comment that I was replying to specifically referred to employee time per month. That's naturally going to be different from some high-rate consultant, so this is totally an apples-to-oranges comparison. Furthermore, it's a large market and there are plenty of consultancies in Europe charging significantly less than that.
* We’re a shop full of developers, but none of us have the required skill set to host and debug a python app.
* We’re fairly well booked. Any time I’d assign one of the folks to maintaining tool X, I’d have to take from time assigned to client work. Which means the internal cost is not what’s interesting. What counts is “how much do I loose by not having them work in billable hours?”
All of this means that the calculation is strongly tilted in favor of buy.