Choosing between custom software and SaaS
Most comparisons start by listing what a SaaS tool does versus what a custom build could do — and SaaS almost always wins that comparison on day one, because someone else has already built, tested and polished it. The more useful question is what happens in year two and three: who owns the data, what happens if the vendor changes its pricing or shuts the product down, and how much of the business's actual process has to bend to fit the tool's fixed workflow rather than the other way around.
Where SaaS is clearly the right call
For anything genuinely standard — accounting, email, basic CRM for a straightforward sales process — a mature SaaS product is usually cheaper, faster to get running, and better maintained than a custom equivalent could ever be for the same money. The business isn't doing anything in these areas that's actually different from thousands of other companies, so there's no advantage in building something unique.
Where custom starts to make more sense
The calculation shifts once a process is genuinely specific to the business — a workflow shaped by a regulatory requirement, a multi-step approval chain unique to how the company operates, or a customer-facing portal that needs to look and feel like part of the brand rather than a generic third-party tool. It also shifts once a business is paying for three or four SaaS subscriptions that don't talk to each other and someone is manually re-entering the same data between them — at that point, the real cost isn't the subscriptions, it's the hours spent bridging them, and a connected system often costs less over two years than the manual workaround.
We help founders work through this decision with real numbers — subscription cost plus workaround hours versus build cost plus maintenance — rather than a general preference for one approach over the other.
Frequently asked
Most comparisons start by listing what a SaaS tool does versus what a custom build could do — and SaaS almost always wins that comparison on day one, because someone else has already built, tested and polished it. The more useful question is what happens in year two and three: who owns the data, what happens if the vendor changes its pricing or shuts the product down, and how much of the business's actual process has to bend to fit the tool's fixed workflow rather than the other way around.
For anything genuinely standard — accounting, email, basic CRM for a straightforward sales process — a mature SaaS product is usually cheaper, faster to get running, and better maintained than a custom equivalent could ever be for the same money. The business isn't doing anything in these areas that's actually different from thousands of other companies, so there's no advantage in building something unique.
We help founders work through this decision with real numbers — subscription cost plus workaround hours versus build cost plus maintenance — rather than a general preference for one approach over the other.