Tiny puts a price tag on building your own core rich text editor

For Globex, it’s $15,368,729. For Wolfram & Hart, it’s $29,425,179. For Montgomery Burns, it’s $22,314,689, and for Baxter Stockman, $19,893,421. That's what they paid to build their own core rich text editors.

These companies* are among the thousands of enterprises who’ve endeavoured to build their own Rich Text Editor (RTE). The project was outside their development team’s core specialization, but in each case, control of the development process was deemed of greater importance than the agility offered by buying and assembling specialist components for their tech stack.

As a result, every one of them encountered the same maze of roadblocks, delays, cost blow-outs, and scope creep that happens with every rich text editor project build.

“It cost too much,” Sid Phillips, the CEO from Wolfram & Hart said. He didn’t even get the advanced features (over and above a core editing experience) that his growing SaaS company needed to compete in his market. When he was told the staggering sum, “It’s like we’ve poured money into a black box. And there’s still more going into it, than the results coming out the other end. We can’t keep doing this.”

How did they get that price tag?

Companies are under pressure. Digital transformation is driving rapid-fire change and neither their budgets, nor developer resources, are elastic. But despite that, enterprises still persist in building their own... monolithic everything.

According to a 2020 McKinsey report, “With technology powering everything from how a business runs to the products and services it sells, companies in industries ranging from retail to manufacturing to banking are having to develop a range of new skill sets and capabilities. In addition to mastering the nuances of their industry, they need to excel first and foremost at developing software.”

Rich text editors are hard to build

Rich text editors are one of the highest-risk areas for both cost and development time overruns. Feature and system complexities are notoriously underestimated, iterative bugs demand constant attention, and the growth of remote working is forcing rapid and constant evolution.

A development team who’s inexperienced in developing RTEs generally underestimates the myriad of edge cases, across both browsers and functionality. Even things that are perceived to be basic, are hard.

Core components of a rich text editor

The no-frills core components of a basic (minimum expectations) rich text editor are:

Building a rich text editor is far beyond what most developers initially consider, which is why most rich text editor specialists, like Tiny, have large, dedicated teams of developers – all with deep domain knowledge – working on them year-round.

In addition, a trusted editor requires constant ongoing maintenance and extensibility work – to keep up with browsers, changing technologies and how the content is best displayed to its ultimate audience, the reader.

It should be noted the above costs exclude the additional costs of Senior Product Manager support (prior to the discovery/inception phases and also throughout the project) as well as Senior Product Designer support, during the development of a rich text editor.

That said, it doesn’t just start-and-end there. For an enterprise grade rich text editor, more advanced features, such as PowerPaste functionality, are also required.

What's the total cost of ownership of a rich text editor?

To be a valid review, all costs need to be included. So, it's critical to thoroughly understand the total cost of ownership (TCO) incurred throughout the software lifecycle – typically seven or eight years.

On top of the initial core rich text cost estimates above, there’s the additional cost of developing anything beyond that ‘core basics’ list.

Advanced feature development costs

The development of a single much-desired advanced rich text editor feature – that helps users cleanly copy-and-paste content – carries with it additional engineering requirements over and above the core editor costs.