There is no yes and no. This is a fact. Even a small startup of 3-5 people will pay more in terms of salaries than the total license costs they consume. A larger enterprise will will spend 50 to 100 times more on salaries then software license fees.

The reason software licenses are easier to cut by the finance team when things are not going well is because software does not have feelings although we all know that this not making a dent. Ultimately software scales much better than people and if the software is "thinking" it will scale infinitely better.

Building it all in house will only happen for 2 reasons: 1. The problem is so specific that this is the only variable option and the quickest (fear enough). 2. Developers and management do not have real understanding of software costs.

Developers not understanding the real costs should be forgiven because most of them are never in position to make these type of decisions - i.e they are not trained. However a manager / executive not understanding this is sign of lack of experience. You really need to try to build a few medium-sized none essential software systems in-house to get an idea how bad this can get and what a waste of time and money it really is - resources you could have spent elsewhere to effect the bottom the real bottomline.

Also the lines of code that are written do not scale linearly with team sizes. The more code you produce the bigger the problem - even with AI.

Ultimately a company wants to write as few line of code as possible that extract as much value as feasibly possible.