Own the Worker

A worker is whatever does the job today: a person clicking through screens, a consultant running a script, an agent replaying a prompt. Owning the worker means your team runs and extends that job without renting someone else's runtime forever.

Rent vs own

Renting looks cheap early: SaaS seat, API calls, a consultant on retainer. Owning costs more upfront: code, tests, training, on-call. In regulated operations, owning wins because you can answer audit questions without calling a vendor.

What transfer includes

Source in your repo. Deploy docs. Runbooks for failure modes. Tests that prove the happy path and the obvious breaks. A session where your engineer deploys a change while you watch.

Transfer is not a PDF handoff. It is confidence that the system survives your team and my departure.

When ownership is not worth it

Truly commodity functions: email delivery, payment processing, identity. Buy those. Own the workflow that is specific to how your quality team reviews deviations, not the SMTP library.