SaaS Is Dead — At Least as a Competitive Advantage

SaaS Is Dead — At Least as a Competitive Advantage

€30. All inclusive. Starter, main, dessert — as much as you like.

The all-you-can-eat buffet sounds like a great deal. Until you notice that you're paying for 40 dishes even though you only enjoy five of them. That the quality of the one dish you actually wanted suffers because it had to be cooked for a thousand different tastes at once. And that the person at the next table — your direct competitor — is sitting there eating the exact same thing off the exact same plate.

With that same €30, you could have ordered a single dish made precisely for you. Fresh. Precise. Better.

That's the situation with enterprise software in 2026.

The SaaSpocalypse of February 2026 made this visible at scale: the SaaS index fell 6.5% while the S&P 500 rose 17.6%. Investors have understood what many business leaders still resist acknowledging. SaaS as a category isn't dying — but SaaS as a competitive advantage already has.

Software as Commodity — The Quiet End of an Era

When SaaS emerged in the 2000s, it was a revolution. Mid-sized businesses suddenly had access to CRM systems, marketing automation, and project management tools previously reserved for enterprises. Access itself was the advantage.

That democratisation is complete. And with it, the equation has flipped.

According to the Retool 2026 Build vs. Buy Report, 35% of companies have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom build. 78% plan to build more in 2026. PitchBook put it sharply: "SaaS Is Dead, Long Live SaS" — where the new "S" stands for Services, not Software.

The underlying logic: if every competitor can buy the same software at the same price, with the same features, from the same vendor — the software itself is not a differentiator. It's infrastructure. As neutral as electricity from the grid.

The HubSpot Paradox: 100 Features, 10 of Which You Actually Need

HubSpot isn't a bad product. Quite the opposite — it's one of the best in its class. That's precisely the problem.

To serve hundreds of thousands of customers, HubSpot must work for all industries, all company sizes, all process models. This inevitably produces feature bloat: functionality you'll never touch but still pay for. And something even more expensive: compromises at the exact points that matter most to you.

Your sales process isn't standard. Your onboarding flow isn't standard. Your lead qualification approach isn't standard — otherwise you'd be interchangeable. But HubSpot is standard. And anyone using standard software to model non-standard processes loses a little of what makes them unique every single day.

These costs rarely show up in the invoice. They show up in the answer to: Why does our team do so many manual workarounds?

The Tailored Suit: What Bespoke Software Actually Means

There's an image that captures it well: if you take the money from one to two years of HubSpot spend and invest it instead in a tailored suit that wraps around your business like silk — you don't just get a better, more focused tool. You get ownership and the ability to adapt quickly as your needs evolve.

Custom software isn't a luxury for enterprises with 100-person IT departments. It's a strategic decision about what becomes an asset versus what remains a commodity.

The difference:

• SaaS belongs to the vendor. The vendor decides on roadmap, pricing, features, and deprecation.
• Custom software belongs to you. You decide what gets built, when it changes, and where your data lives.

This sounds abstract — until the SaaS vendor raises prices by 40%, locks a critical feature behind a more expensive plan, or gets acquired. Then the dependency becomes painfully concrete.

Full data ownership is not a nice-to-have. For businesses operating under GDPR — which means all European companies — control over where data resides and who can access it is a strategic and regulatory necessity. We explore this further in our post on GDPR-compliant AI with on-premise LLMs.

The Math Nobody Does

Here's the thought experiment business leaders rarely run:

Take your current SaaS stack. Add up every licence — CRM, marketing automation, project management, HR tool, reporting dashboard. For a mid-sized company with 30–50 users, that's quickly €50,000 to €100,000 per year.

Now the counter-question: what would a bespoke tool cost that contains exactly the 10 features you actually use — one that models your processes instead of the other way around?

Thanks to agentic development, the answers today are radically different from 2022. A focused tool for a specific process is now achievable in a matter of weeks for €30,000 to €60,000 — not five times that. Costs keep falling while quality keeps rising.

The break-even against SaaS licences today often lands at under 18 months. After that, every euro flows back into your own processes — not the vendor's pricing team.

AI Changes the Equation — Building Is Faster Than Ever

What has fundamentally shifted the equation isn't desire — it's feasibility.

51% of developers have already shipped production tools actively used by their teams — using AI assistance that shortens development cycles by 40 to 60%. Vibe coding now makes it possible for domain experts without deep programming knowledge to build prototypes that actually work.

This creates a new asymmetry: SaaS vendors have to build for everyone. Your custom software only has to work for you.

That's a fundamental difference. A SaaS vendor developing a new feature must secure, document, test, and maintain it for hundreds of thousands of different use cases. You only need it for one. That makes your custom solution inevitably better in its specific context.

And AI agents embedded deep into your business logic simply aren't possible in standard software — that would require architectural access you never have with SaaS.

When Custom Software Doesn't Make Sense

Honesty matters more than sales rhetoric here: custom development is not always the right answer.

Keep buying standard software when:

• The process is a commodity — accounting, email, basic collaboration. There's no differentiation to win here.
• You have no development partner and no intention of finding one. Software without maintenance is technical debt on a timer.
• You need a solution in weeks and the process isn't business-critical.
• Regulatory updates are centrally important — e.g. payroll software that automatically integrates legislative changes.

Getting Started: Not Everything at Once

The most common mistake isn't building too little — it's starting with the wrong scope. Anyone beginning with a full platform rewrite fails at the complexity. Anyone beginning with a concrete bottleneck wins quickly.

The pragmatic path in three steps:

1. Identify one process currently running with SaaS workarounds — where manual work arises because the tool doesn't map your reality.
2. Build a prototype in 2 to 4 weeks that solves exactly this process. Not a big-bang project, but a validated increment.
3. Iterate and expand once the ROI is visible. The tailored suit is built piece by piece — not as a single large commission.

Where do you currently stand in your software strategy? The AI Readiness Assessment helps you gauge which processes are ready for custom development — and which still benefit from standard solutions.

A hybrid approach is often the smartest entry point: standard ERP for accounting and compliance, but a custom tool for the process that constitutes your competitive advantage.

FAQ: Custom Software Instead of SaaS

Isn't custom software much more expensive than SaaS?

Initially yes — but that's the wrong time horizon. Over three to five years, cumulative SaaS licence costs at medium complexity are usually higher than development plus maintenance of a custom solution. And custom software doesn't scale with user count — you pay no per-seat fee.

What happens if my development partner disappears?

That's exactly the right question — and the reason architecture matters. Code built on open standards (Next.js, PostgreSQL, REST APIs) can be taken over by any other development team. Vendor lock-in comes from proprietary systems, not from custom development per se.

How long until something is production-ready?

With AI-assisted development, we typically deliver a production-ready solution in 8 to 12 weeks at IJONIS. A working prototype is often ready in 2 to 4 weeks — fast enough to validate the business case before committing the full investment.

Do I need to build an internal development team?

No. An experienced development partner can handle build, hosting, and maintenance. You need one person internally who can define requirements and review outputs — not a CTO.

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SaaS isn't dead. But the era in which using SaaS was a competitive advantage is over. What remains: the decision about which processes you share with everyone — and which ones belong to you alone.

Want to know which process in your business is ready for custom development? Talk to us — we'll analyse your specific use case and give you an honest assessment of whether and where custom software makes financial sense.