Why Choose Sablier over Custom Vesting Contracts?

Broadly speaking, there are two options when it comes to onchain token vesting. You can either build your own vesting smart contracts or opt for a tailored solution like Sablier. In this blog post, we will explore the drawbacks of using custom vesting contracts.

Development costs

Smart contract developers are expensive, and building custom vesting contracts often ends up costing tens of thousands of dollars.

Moreover, developing smart contracts is time-intensive. Beyond the time required, there’s a significant opportunity cost: every hour your developers spend building vesting contracts is time they could be dedicating to building your core product.

Properly building these contracts also demands rigorous testing and auditing, whi  ch can eat up more time and resources.

And that’s just the beginning. The next step involves creating an interface that allows employees, investors, and other stakeholders to manage their vesting schedules. Following that, you’ll need to provide ongoing support for users who encounter issues.

By contrast, setting up a vesting program with Sablier takes only minutes. Embrace simplicity.

Security

Building secure smart contracts is no trivial task. The risks are significant, with numerous potential vulnerabilities that could lead to your vesting contracts being hacked and your vested supply dumped on the open market.

Even after building the contracts, a proper audit is essential to ensure their safety. Remember, we’re talking about your team’s treasury, which must be stored as securely as possible. Audits, however, require both time and money.

Sablier, on the other hand, has undergone extensive audits, has operated without a single hack for over five years, and has processed billions of dollars in total value locked (TVL).

Custom interface

Custom vesting contracts require a custom interface—it’s simply unrealistic to expect recipients to manually claim their tokens via Etherscan (some teams have resorted to this error-prone approach, but we strongly advise against it).

Building and maintaining a custom interface demands significant time and resources. This is especially time-consuming as wallet standards change over time, and breaking changes in wallet frameworks have happened several times in the past.

In comparison, Sablier is actively maintained, supports the latest wallet standards and web frameworks, and offers a user-friendly design for a seamless user experience.

Customer support

It’s unlikely you’ll have the capacity to provide continuous support to your users. And even if you do, covering all time zones is nearly impossible. What happens if an investor encounters an issue during the night or over the weekend? Will they have to wait hours—or even days—for assistance?

Sablier offers 24/7 human support—no bots. This round-the-clock service is crucial for maintaining strong relationships with your stakeholders and ensuring their satisfaction.

Hidden costs

You might have done the math and consider it cheaper to build your own vesting solution, but there are many hidden costs:

• Audit costs: if you want to build your contracts properly, you will need at least one audit, which depending on the complexity and size of your codebase, could take up to several weeks and cost up to tens of thousands of dollars.
• Ongoing maintenance costs: web3 wallet standards change all the time, requiring your team to integrate those changes to ensure compatibility with the wallets used by your employees, investors and other stakeholders.
• Opportunity costs: all the time you spend trying to figure out what the best solution is, building your own contracts, building out an interface, testing it, auditing it, and maintaining it, is time you could spend building out your product instead.

Time is money, and Sablier respects your time. Our protocol is extensively audited, we actively maintain our interface and product offering, and it takes a few minutes to set everything up. You can focus on what matters: growing your business.

Trust and reputation

Sablier is a trusted solution, widely recognized across the crypto ecosystem and backed by prominent names like a16z crypto, A Capital, and numerous angel investors. In fact, there’s a good chance your investors have already used our protocol and are familiar with our product.

Choosing Sablier signals your commitment to security, efficiency, and user experience. On the other hand, building your own contracts may raise concerns about their reliability.

Conclusion

Creating your own vesting smart contracts might seem appealing, but the reality is that it’s a costly, risky, and a time-consuming project. Sablier eliminates these problems by providing a secure, audited, and user-friendly solution with 24/7 support. Focus on what you do best—building your project—and let Sablier handle the rest.

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Want to use Sablier, but it’s missing a feature that is essential for you? You can request features in our Canny dashboard.