Not only does developing your own chat solutions give you total freedom with what features to integrate, privacy concerns are alleviated by knowing where your messages are being routed to and stored at; a stark contrast to adopting a third party service.
In addition, third parties will undoubtedly be routing your messages for data analysis, weighting neural networks for their AI efforts, and more. Leveraging your own solution opens you up to the same capabilities, boosting your raw data and keeping it private in the process.
An in-house chat solution is not only viable for small teams - or even individuals, it is also maintainable and expandable when developed with Typescript in conjunction with other great tools used in this repo.