We build software for law firms, so this is the question we get most: should we keep paying for Clio or MyCase, or build our own?
The honest answer is that it depends on three things: your seat count, whether the platform blocks a workflow you care about, and how much ownership matters to you. Below is the framework we walk firms through, including the cases where we tell them to stay put.
Start with the 3-year number, not the monthly one
The monthly seat price is designed to look small. The number that actually matters is what you will pay over three years, with headcount growth and renewal increases included.
For a 15-attorney firm:
- Clio: roughly $103,000 to $165,000 over three years across seats, add-ons, and payment processing.
- MyCase: roughly $115,000 to $130,000 over three years once accounting, LawPay processing, and renewal increases are included. We broke that down line by line in our MyCase TCO post.
At the end of those three years, you own nothing. Cancel, and the workflow stops. Your data export is a CSV.
What buying is genuinely good at
This is not a hit piece on SaaS. For a lot of firms, renting is the right call, and we will say so on a discovery call.
Buying wins when you are small, your workflow is standard, and you want zero maintenance. Clio and MyCase are mature, supported, and updated for you. You are live this afternoon. For a solo or a five-person firm running a conventional practice, the monthly cost is not yet material and a build would be overkill.
What building actually gets you
A custom case management build is paid once and runs $17,000 to $53,000 depending on scope. Three things change when you own it:
- The per-seat meter stops. Add attorneys without adding cost. The software is an asset, not a recurring bill that grows with the firm.
- It fits your workflow. The intake, the matter stages, the roles, the reports. You stop bending your practice to fit a product roadmap you do not control.
- You own the data and the code. It runs on your own cloud accounts. No lock-in, and a cleaner answer for compliance and client confidentiality.
The break-even
For most growing firms above roughly ten to fifteen seats, a build recoups in 14 to 18 months against the per-seat bill it replaces. After that, every month is money the firm keeps instead of renting. The math compounds for firms running a separate intake CRM on top of practice management: we broke down that two-system case in Clio + Lawmatics: what the two-system stack really costs.
Update, 27 August 2026. A real number to anchor that break-even, from a buyer. A senior attorney at a nine-attorney firm in Oregon added up his firm's stack on a call with us this summer: Clio, Lawmatics and the practice software around them come to about $60,000 a year. Then he asked, in his own words, "can Clio and Lawmatics be combined into one product?" We hadn't raised consolidation. Against $60,000 a year, a build at the top of the $17,000 to $53,000 range is paid back inside the first year, and that's before counting the contact records, intake forms and e-signature the firm pays for on both platforms at once. The Lawmatics half of that bill is broken down in the real cost of Lawmatics, and what the Clio half costs to walk away from is in the cost of leaving Clio.
The honest test is simple: take your real 3-year SaaS cost, subtract the one-time build cost, and see whether the remainder plus the workflow fit is worth it. If the math does not beat staying put, stay put. We would rather tell you that than sell you a build you do not need.
What a build includes
A production case management platform is not a weekend project, and it is not a science experiment either. The core is well understood: multi-step matter intake, role-based access for attorneys, paralegals, and clients, a configurable case-stage tracker, encrypted document handling linked to the matter, and an append-only audit trail. We run this on an engine already in production for a regulated firm, so most firms are live on an MVP in six to eight weeks, with data migrated from the old system before go-live.
The short version
Buy if you are small, standard, and cost-insensitive for now. Build if your seat count is climbing, the platform is blocking how you want to practice, or ownership matters. And decide on the 3-year number, because the monthly price is the one designed to keep you from doing the math.
Two specifics worth pricing into either side of this decision: reconciling Clio, your payment processor, and the general ledger, and the records retrieval desk. Both are usually solved with headcount rather than by either platform.
If you want that math for your firm, we will run it for free: your real per-seat cost over three years, a draft scope, and a rough quote, before you commit to anything.
