When is writing in-house a false economy?

One of my favorite clients on the agency side contacted me a few weeks ago about writing a large series of case studies for one of their clients. I'd do the writing, the agency would do the project managing. We presented a very reasonable price per case study and agreed to an aggressive schedule.

However, the client company apparently experienced sticker shock with this many case studies and decided to try to do it in-house.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? Of course not, if they have the in-house expertise and time to write and manage the things. But large case study projects, where a company is producing 50 or more within a short time period, is an horrendous project to dump onto in-house staff. And since companies with case studies stand to make a large amount of money with them, outsourcing a case study program can make much better financial sense than burdening already-busy internal resources. We'll see what happens. It's my fond hope that they give up, contact the agency and outsource the project -- which will be better for them, better for the agency and better for me! Heh, everybody wins.