The Hidden Tax of DIY: Why using in-house devices slows your ship cycles

Sauce Labs

Jun 7, 2026

Think building your own mobile device lab is the smart move? It starts that way — but the real costs are hiding in plain sight.

In this webinar, Diego Molina (Senior Field Solutions Engineer & Selenium Project Lead at Sauce Labs) walks through his firsthand experience building and eventually outgrowing a DIY mobile testing infrastructure — and breaks down the hidden maintenance loop that quietly drains engineering time, budget, and focus.

What you'll learn:
→ When DIY device labs actually make sense (and when they don't)
→ Why the physical device is only 10% of the equation — the platform is the other 90%
→ How growth exposes the cracks: multi-location teams, parallel testing, OS updates, new device form factors
→ The real opportunity cost of becoming your own infrastructure company
→ How Sauce Labs' Real Device Access API lets you use cloud devices as if they're plugged into your laptop
→ Live demo: network throttling, dev tools, accessibility testing, and Appium test execution on real devices
→ How AI agents can interact with real devices through cloud infrastructure

Key insight: "The test is faster if you don't have to debug it twice."
Whether you're running a small in-house lab or evaluating cloud testing at scale, this session gives you the framework to make the right call — and understand what it's actually costing you today.

🔗 Try Sauce Labs: https://saucelabs.com

Chapters:

0:00 – Introduction & Diego's background

1:30 – When DIY is the right call

3:30 – The hidden maintenance loop begins

7:00 – Growth exposes the cracks

9:00 – Real users vs. your lab environment

13:00 – The 10% device / 90% platform breakdown

17:00 – Owning vs. accessing: the shift in thinking

19:00 – Real Device Access API demo

20:00 – Debugging failures in DIY vs. cloud

23:00 – The build-vs-buy fork in the road