Built to Break: The Common Engineering Flaws Costing Your Business

This column is written by Vadym Shvydkyi, Head of Software Engineering at INSART, where he’s spent over a decade building and optimizing engineering teams for fintech projects. Together with his team, he has helped businesses save over $30 million through infrastructure and architecture improvements. He’s seen firsthand how shortcuts in software development drain budgets and derail growth. In this column, he shares the engineering flaws that cost SMEs the most and how to avoid them.

Six months. That’s how long the average business can survive before its cash reserves run dry. For SMEs without vast funding to fall back on or willing investors to ask for more, cutting corners can feel like the only way to get products out of production and issues resolved before service suffers.

But taking shortcuts comes at a cost. Inadequate infrastructure and rushed integrations cause inefficiencies, failures, and security risks. What seems like a saving can quickly turn into a significant loss.

How can SMEs avoid these pitfalls? By building robust architecture from the outset, identifying their inefficiencies, and addressing them before catastrophic failure strikes. For businesses looking to address their engineering flaws, here are four common issues that quietly drain time, funds, and potential.

Rushed builds and quick fixes

From the United States to Europe, cash flow remains a constant pressure for SMEs. In a rush to deliver, leaders often turn to quick fixes – off-the-shelf SaaS tools or rushed code – to get operations up and running. Yet, what solves today’s problem can create tomorrow’s.

Say, for instance, you’re a fintech SME utilizing an open banking API to fetch user account data. Calls are cheap, so you set it up and quickly move on to the next problem. Only after launch do you realize that you forgot to implement caching or rate limiting, triggering a flood of unnecessary calls. Those small charges quickly snowball into thousands – enough to put many small businesses in the red.

Over the years, I’ve helped businesses save over $30 million in engineering costs, mostly through infrastructure and architecture optimization. Evidently, building cheap and fast rarely saves money.

Rather, SMEs should be investing in systems built to scale and last, resulting in fewer surprises and less downtime as the business grows.

Security-as-a-sidenote

It’s a common misconception that cybercriminals only target large companies, and that can encourage under-investment in effective protection. In reality, cybercriminals are indiscriminate, and SMEs often offer an easier target: 67% of attacks on smaller businesses succeed, compared to 23% for larger enterprises.

Much of the time, breaches don’t even involve a hacker. It’s estimated that 200 billion files are sitting exposed in misconfigured cloud buckets, offering anyone with an internet connection access to sensitive data.

Under strict regulations such as the European Union’s GDPR, breaches can cost businesses up to 4% of their annual turnover. Yet, this financial impact is often pale in comparison to the loss of revenue caused by service disruptions and reputational damage.

When it comes to cutting costs, cybersecurity isn’t the place to skimp. For SMEs, even a single breach can be enough to shutter the business.

Hiring local talent, not top talent

There’s a whole world of talent out there, and SMEs need to look beyond their domestic market – but not as a cost-saving measure. The real value comes from accessing expertise: finding markets where talent isn’t just abundant, but actually understands your industry. That isn’t always available close to home.

India exports 700% more AI professionals than any other country, suggesting there’s a vast, underutilised pool of specialised expertise. Likewise, 1.3% of Singapore’s workforce is employed in cybersecurity, despite domestic demand slowing. For SMEs, these surpluses are an opportunity to access world-class talent that might be scarce in their local market.

But skills and knowledge alone don’t make a perfect fit. Strategic alignment also matters. 

Singapore might boast a wealth of fintech expertise, but is it a suitable talent pool for a Europe-based business? Probably not. Time zones, work culture, and compliance requirements differ, which can hinder collaboration. Countries like Ukraine, Poland, or Romania are a far better fit, enabling smoother collaboration and faster decision-making.

Poor knowledge management

Even teams that approach problems the ‘right’ way often waste valuable resources unnecessarily. Why? Because there’s a high chance – particularly in sectors like fintech, where compliance, integration, and infrastructure challenges tend to repeat across products – the problem has been solved before.

The average employee spends nearly six hours every week duplicating work, whether knowingly because the information required is inaccessible or unknowingly because it was never shared.

The fix? Actively documenting and sharing experiences through an accessible internal knowledge base. Every project should be treated as an asset, used to create frameworks, templates, and playbooks, so teams can stop reinventing the wheel time after time.

Don’t build for launch; build for longevity

Cutting corners can be costly: technical debt, bloated infrastructure, and inefficient processes. You’re not saving engineering hours. You’re choosing to pay later, often with interest.

I’ve seen how much is lost to inefficiency, and I can confidently say that the real cost-saver is building scalable architecture and sustainable systems from day one. Sure, it may cost you more upfront. However, the payoff is a solution that doesn’t just launch, but lasts.