Some of it, yes — and the DIY-able parts are the ones most likely to actually solve the problem, which is not what most people expect.
Worth Doing Yourself
Downspout extensions. Getting roof water six to eight feet away from the wall instead of dumping it at the foundation. A morning’s work, under a hundred dollars, and on a real share of houses it is the whole fix.
Grading. Building soil up against the foundation so it falls away at roughly an inch per foot for the first six feet. Physical work, cheap materials, genuinely effective.
Window wells. Clearing them, adding a cover, checking the drain is not blocked with sixty years of leaves.
Gutter cleaning. Unglamorous and frequently the actual cause.
Do all four before paying anyone for anything. If water stops arriving, you have saved five figures.
Not Worth Doing Yourself
Interior perimeter drainage. Cutting a channel around the slab, laying tile at the footing and tying it to a sump is a big, dusty, structural-adjacent job where mistakes are buried under new concrete. Get it done properly.
Anything on a bowing or horizontally cracked wall. That is a load problem. Basement wall repair is engineering, and a strap installed wrongly is worse than no strap because it convinces you the problem is handled.
Exterior excavation. Digging a trench to footing depth alongside a loaded foundation wall is genuinely dangerous.
The One That Wastes Money
Waterproof masonry paint on a wall that has active water behind it. It is sold hard and it fails predictably: hydrostatic pressure pushes the coating off the substrate from behind, usually within a season or two, and you are back where you started having also made the wall harder to diagnose.
It has a legitimate use on a dry wall for damp control and appearance. It is not a fix for water under pressure, and if a wall is seeping, pressure is what you have.
If you have done the outside work and water is still arriving, that is genuinely useful diagnostic information — send it through the contact form along with what you tried.