Cloud SaaS or build it ourselves?

Build only when MLM is your actual differentiator and you have a $1M+ engineering budget for the first year and a team strong on Laravel, Rails, or Django patterns. Otherwise SaaS. The vendor R&D investment in mature SaaS MLMs dwarfs what one team can ship; even strong teams burn 18 months replicating standard MLM features rather than building network-specific differentiation. The exception is the hybrid pattern: build the layers that ARE your differentiator, use SaaS for everything else. The honest test is whether you'd be willing to open-source the platform code today; if yes, it isn't your moat.