Choose Banking-as-a-Service when speed to market matters more than margin and you can genuinely accept a sponsor's risk appetite as your own. Choose your own licence when the unit economics only work if you hold the deposits and the interchange, or when your roadmap needs products a sponsor will not approve. The question is not which is cheaper, because BaaS almost always is initially, but whether your business model survives someone else controlling what you may offer.
The clearest test is to write down the three product decisions you most want to make in the next two years, then ask whether a sponsor could veto any of them. If the answer is yes and those decisions are load-bearing, BaaS is renting a business model instead of building one.
The second test is offboarding. Sponsor relationships end, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with you. A change in the sponsor's own risk posture, a regulatory finding against their programme, an acquisition. A BaaS strategy without a documented migration path is a single point of failure with someone else's hand on the switch.
Many teams start on BaaS and migrate, which is entirely viable but only if the ledger was built to be portable from the first line: your own data model, your own interface, and the ability to reconstruct balances independently of the provider. Teams that skipped that discipline find the migration is quoted as a multi-year programme and quietly conclude they cannot afford it.
Own-licence economics change the shape of the business, not the size of the bill. Holding deposits means treasury income, capital requirements, a compliance function and a regulator who now supervises you directly. That is a different company, not the same company with better margins.