To Build or to Buy: Why Most Manufacturers Shouldn’t Take the DIY Approach to Thickness Monitoring

If you’re moving $1 million or more of thickness-sensitive material through a single production process, a purpose-built thickness monitoring system isn’t optional; it’s as fundamental to your operations as your PLCs and motors. 

Without reliable thickness monitoring, you’re guessing — every day, and every dollar. You’re building in 1% to 2% safety margins to account for what you don’t know, wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars in raw materials per year. You’re stopping lines for manual mic checks. You’re relying on operators instead of automation. And you’re risking costly scrap, rework, and quality issues that ripple through your entire operation. 

Most teams think they need basic laser thickness sensors to solve these problems, and that it’s something they can put together themselves. But at this scale, what they actually need is something much bigger: a fully-integrated thickness monitoring system. They just don’t know it yet. 

They need a purpose-built thickness monitoring system that replaces human guesswork with real-time, closed-loop data, slashes scrap, tightens spec, and frees your engineers to focus on throughput, not on babysitting gauges or chasing down anomalies.

This system is the holy grail of thickness monitoring. And it’s one that any engineering team would love to build themselves. But it’s often not until they’re too far down the DIY path that they see what it actually entails and costs. 

In this article, we scope out the true cost, effort, time, and risks associated with building your own thickness monitoring system. 

And we highlight that existing “off-the-shelf” solutions are a better-performing and more cost-effective solution than DIY. 

Why companies choose to build their own

At a glance, building your own thickness gauge can feel like the most logical step — especially for highly capable engineering teams. You already have access to sensors, a machine shop, engineers, and a line that needs measuring. It seems like a solvable problem.

And in some cases — and at some companies — it is. In our experience, companies typically choose to build their own for one of four reasons:

• They’ve built something similar before. Often with single-point gauges, R&D setups, or prototype equipment. That experience creates confidence that they can build a production-ready gauge.
• They need something quickly. A sensor and frame seem like fast fixes, especially if vendor lead times are long.
• They want something customized. Off-the-shelf systems can seem too rigid or too generalized for specific lines or data workflows.
• They think developing their own system will provide a competitive advantage, as competitors won’t have the same depth and breadth of thickness monitoring capabilities as they do.

These are rational motivations on the surface, but they often underestimate how scope, cost, and complexity quickly escalate when transitioning from a gauge to a full-system solution. 

As you’ll see below, what starts simple rarely stays that way.

What you’re missing with building your own solution

Building your own thickness monitoring system seems simple enough on the surface:

• Buy a pair of laser sensors
• Bolt them to a frame
• And plug in and configure some software and the sensor settings.

And yes, at the core, that’s how these systems work. But that’s not what you need. It’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What you really need is a thickness monitoring system that delivers reliable, production-grade performance across every shift, every SKU, and every operator. And that’s where things get exponentially more complicated.

DIY builds may get you 80% of the way there — hardware, basic measurements, and a dashboard. But you don’t have a viable solution without the last 20%. That’s where it gets complicated: auto-calibration, thermal drift correction, line-specific integration and purpose-built software, real-time alarming, closed-loop feedback, support, documentation, and diagnostics and maintenance information. 

The result?

A functioning but incomplete DIY system often results in the following as time passes:

• Trust in the system declines, leading operators to fall back on manual mic checks
• Ongoing frequent manual recalibrations become necessary to maintain accuracy
• Data may appear accurate, but drifts subtly due to dust, heat, or vibration, leading to false confidence and costly decisions
• Understanding of exactly where, when, and what the laser is measuring erodes over time
• Lack of resolution means early stage process adjustments are missed and problems are noticed too late
• Accuracy concerns arise as operators question whether the system is filtering gaps properly or reading extra irrelevant information
• Lack of structured logging or and data export tools means insights are lost, and long-term process improvements stall
• Bad measurements trigger both false in-spec or false out-of-spec actions, causing rework, waste, or line downtime. Non-conforming materials pass through to the next production process or make their way to the customer.
• Product changeovers require manual tweaks to maintain alignment and settings
• Core engineering resources get diverted to maintain or troubleshoot the system
• When failures occur, there’s no support line to call

Could you build the missing layers to solve all of these issues? Maybe. 

But you’d be committing your team to the full cost, complexity, and long-term maintenance of a system that already exists — pre-built, proven, and production-ready. 

The real question isn’t “Can we build it?” It’s “Why would we?”

A caveat based on production volume

Building your own thickness monitoring solution can be the right move, especially if you’re running low volumes, doing R&D, or just starting out. 

But once you’re pushing serious material through production — more than $1M annually on multi-shift, high speed lines — the risks, costs, and performance demands outgrow what DIY can handle. 

That’s when a basic set-up stops being good enough, and a full-system solution like Mate Gauge becomes essential. And while that might sound expensive, the reality is that pre-built solutions are actually much cheaper — and more effective — upfront and in the long run than a DIY build. 

What goes into a viable thickness monitoring solution?

Many manufacturers underestimate both what effective thickness monitoring truly requires, and what it takes to build that system in-house. 

This creates a disconnect: they see a purpose-built solution like Mate Gauge as “too big” or “too expensive,” and a DIY approach as more manageable. But in reality, it’s the opposite. 

Building your own system is the far bigger commitment; an open-ended engineering project that grows in cost, complexity, and risk the moment you scale. What starts simple quickly becomes a full-blown product your team must support for the total lifespan of the system.

You don’t want to solve the problem of needing a full-fledged thickness monitoring system by becoming a thickness monitoring system developer.

Here’s what building your own really entails:

Mate Gauge (Pre-Built Solution)	Build Your Own (DIY System)
Risk-free accuracy: System tested, validated, and verified by subject matter experts in real-world labs.	Accuracy risk: Sensors may drift due to temperature or misalignment — without built-in auto-calibration.
Optimized system design: Robust, heat-stable, dirt-resistant scanning platforms designed for harsh industrial environments.	Time-consuming integration: Custom mechanical design, environmental compensation, and testing must be built from scratch.
Lower total cost of ownership: One-time CapEx, no internal development, minimal maintenance, faster ROI.	Higher TCO: Hidden internal costs, engineering delays, and future upgrades inflate long-term expenses.
Plug-and-play data access: Real-time reporting, exports, and dashboards — all standard.	Limited data visibility: Often lacks logging, export tools, or structured access for operators and engineers.
Purpose-built signal processing: Clean, usable data tailored to your line.	Raw outputs: General-purpose software or APIs require additional filtering and interpretation.
Robust diagnostics: Live KPI views, calibration health, and sensor drift detection.	Limited system awareness: Operators may not know if the system is accurate, calibrated, or aligned.
Dedicated support team: Engineers, integrators, and service professionals ready to assist across your org.	Staff-dependent: System knowledge often lives with one or two internal experts introducing continuity risk.
Industry-tuned applications: mgOS apps are built for real manufacturing environments, not lab use.	Frankenstein solutions: General-purpose tools cobbled together into a fragile ecosystem.
Future-proofed: Ongoing support for API changes, field conditions, hardware obsolescence.	One-off build: Scaling, updating, or replicating across lines is slow, costly, and error-prone.
Fully documented + controlled: Manuals, diagrams, spares lists, and escalation plans included.	Under-documented: Knowledge silos and version mismatches create maintenance headaches.

Measurement accuracy

• A motion system for full-strip scanning, calibration, and cleaning routines
• Auto-calibration tools to correct for heat, vibration, and long-term drift
• A systematic approach — like Mate Gauge’s Vmic — to correlating laser readings with touch-based standards.
• Dirt detection and sensor cleaning to prevent measurement degradation

Mate Gauge’s Virtual Micrometer (Vmic) replicates the precision of a handheld micrometer, but is installed directly to your production line. It lets you define virtual “anvil” positions across the strip, delivering continuous, real-time measurements and KPIs that are traceable, repeatable, and operator-independent.

System intelligence

• Software that translates high-speed readings into actionable insights — KPI tracking, trend analysis, real-time alerts
• Closed-loop PLC feedback so your line can auto-correct, not just observe

Complete architecture

• Hardware: Scanning mechanics, thermal control, vibration isolation, calibration tooling
• Software: Filtering, dashboards, alarms, multi-SKU configuration
• Integrations: SCADA, PLC, historian, and IT systems

All of this is what exists below the water — on the biggest part of the iceberg. You need this to make the system viable and stable. And that’s where the real complexity and cost starts to snowball.

What it costs to build that viable solution yourself

As you pull back the layers on what’s really needed to stand up a performant thickness monitoring solution, the complexity — and associated costs — become clear. Let’s look at the financial numbers associated with building your own. 

While you read through this, keep this number range in mind: $50K to $150K. 

This is the total cost range for a Mate Gauge system, which delivers all of the requirements outlined so far in this article, without the added complexity of building your own. Contrast this against the TCO of a DIY solution. 

Capital costs 

• Sensors: $10K to $25K per pair (industrial-grade, thermally stable)
• Custom frame and mounts: $5K to $15K (designed for rigidity and expansion)
• Motion and scanning system: $20K (motorized, aligned, vibration-isolated)
• Calibration mechanism: $2K+ (NIST-traceable standards, auto-drift compensation)
• Software development: $50K to $100K+ (HMI, alarming, logging, integration)

→ Total CapEx: $100K to $300K+ excluding internal labor, delays, and risk.

Internal resources 

Standing up your own system requires much more than upfront capital. It demands sustained internal effort across multiple disciplines. 

Most in-house builds need three to six roles just to get off the ground, let alone to maintain these systems for the long term. Staffing requirements include:

• Systems/controls engineer for alignment and PLC integration
• Software developer for UI, alarming, and data handling
• Mechanical designer for stable, thermally reliable frames
• Production and install techs to get hardware on the line
• QA/reliability engineer to validate accuracy and manage drift
• Operator trainer/documentation lead to build out manuals and onboard users

Beyond these roles, there’s a deeper, longer-term risk: institutional knowledge loss. Most DIY systems rely heavily on one or two engineers. If they leave, take PTO, or shift roles, the system can become a black box that no one else fully understands.

Mitigating that risk means investing heavily in documentation, cross-training, version control, and internal support procedures — just to maintain what you’ve already built.

And all of this comes at the cost of focus. Every hour your engineers spend debugging a custom monitoring system is an hour not spent improving throughput, yield, or product quality. You’re diverting your top talent from core manufacturing work to maintain infrastructure.

At the end of the day, this isn’t just a tool you’ve built. It’s now a permanent internal product line that is required for your plant to run, with long-term staffing and support needs.

If it fails, the impact can be devastating and long lasting across your business. 

Mate Gauge includes all of this standard at a lower TCO

If building your own system were the better path, we’d see it working in the wild. But the reality? For many new customers, we’re replacing a failed in-house attempt, and helping them recoup their losses.

Mate Gauge includes everything you’d need to build for between $50K and $150K. Most DIY builds exceed $250K in CapEx alone, not counting staffing, delays, or long-term risk.

And here’s the knockout punch: we deliver this as a standard, production-grade platform, with the ability to customize for your line and help you install and scale.

Those three common reasons to go DIY? They don’t hold up:

• Built something similar before? Scaling is 10x harder.
• Need something fast? Mate Gauge installs quicker than building from scratch.
• Want it customized? We configure it to your exact process.

With Mate Gauge, you’re not just buying hardware — you’re unlocking continuous ROI. You tighten spec, reduce waste, and automate with confidence, while your engineers focus on throughput, not gauges. All for much less money, time, and effort that you’d be wasting on a DIY effort.

This is the system you’d build if you had unlimited time, budget, and staff. But you don’t need to. We already have. And it’s ready to go.

Ready to see Mate Gauge on your line? Contact us now to learn how to get started.