You should treat all tech infrastructure choices as 'build vs buy' decisions, and make the right choice for your organization.
- You want to run a peer-to-peer textbanking system at scale and pay only infrastructure costs
- You have the tech capacity to do the technical deployment work to set up Spoke and maintain your instance over time.
- You want to be able to control costs and system scaling on your own terms. Perhaps you have experienced scaling problems from a textbanking vendor at an inopportune time. You can choose to control this risk by spending developer time and money on hardware running your own system.
- You care about the open source community, want to give back to the progressive movement, and are interested in contributing back fixes and features.
- You don't want to sign a contract with a vendor, and may have a more short term need for peer to peer texting.
- You have straightforward and non-bursty scaling needs that are well documented, that a vendor can meet for you. (We recommend contractually binding vendors to SLAs that ensure you get the service you have been promised)
- You have more money than developer time to spend.
- You don't have an organizational need to control costs, system scaling, or vendor risk.