Imagine paying every month for six different applications: one for email, one for project management, one for invoicing, one for CRM, one for time tracking and one for bookings. They don’t talk to each other. Data is entered twice. And you pay for features you never use. That’s the reality for most small and mid-sized businesses. McKinsey’s Global Survey 2024 showed that 67% of companies with under 200 employees have critical operational data scattered across at least four separate systems.
The average company uses 130 SaaS tools
According to BetterCloud’s 2026 annual report, the average company uses 130 SaaS applications. Small companies land at 72, mid-sized at 120 and large organizations at over 200. The numbers have roughly tripled in the last decade.
The same report shows that 57% of those tools are underused or unused. Between 17% and 25% of the software budget goes to licenses that no one opens. For a Swedish SMB with ten employees this often means SEK 200,000 to 400,000 per year, spread across twelve to twenty subscriptions.
The cost is only half the problem. The other half is the time spent holding the systems together. Integrations that stop working, customer data sitting in silos, support tickets bounced between three vendors.
Why the equation has looked like it has
The logic behind the SaaS boom was reasonable. A small company couldn’t afford to build its own CRM, booking tool or newsletter system, so it subscribed to ready-made solutions from vendors like Salesforce, HubSpot, Cal.com and Mailchimp. The monthly fee felt manageable compared to a development team.
The problem is that the monthly fee grows. Per user, per subscriber, per integration. A Mailchimp license costing SEK 200/month with a 500-contact list costs over SEK 2,500 when it reaches 10,000. A CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot Sales Hub runs SEK 1,500 to 3,500 per user per month. For a growing business the total becomes a fixed, growing cost that’s hard to predict.
The better your business does, the more expensive your SaaS stack becomes. It’s a model that punishes success.
What AI actually changes
Until 2023, building a simple CRM with contact management, pipeline and form builder required a full-time developer for two to three months. Today, an experienced developer does the same job in two to three weeks — with higher quality and fewer bugs.
It’s not because developers got twice as fast. It’s because AI assistants now write 30–50% of the code, handle routine tasks like typing, tests and documentation, and suggest solutions that previously required hours of research.
Deloitte estimates that 60% of all custom enterprise software will contain AI-driven features as early as 2026. This isn’t research, it’s production. At the same time we see that the SaaS industry itself has begun to push back. What BetterCloud calls "the great SaaS unbundling" describes how AI is breaking apart traditional platforms and moving value back to whoever owns the data.
What this means for a regular business
The consequence is that a custom system — where website, newsletter, customer portal, bookings and CRM are connected — today costs about as much as twelve months of stacked SaaS subscriptions. The difference is that the investment is one-time, while SaaS costs just keep growing.
You also avoid the three biggest friction points. Integrations that need maintenance, pricing models that punish growth, and data the customer doesn’t own. In a custom system all customer data lives in your own database, all email addresses in your own register, all order history on your own server.
How we build it
A typical custom business system consists of a Next.js frontend connected to a Postgres database. On top of that we build exactly the modules the business needs: a CRM tailored to the sales process, a booking module that handles physical meetings and video calls, a newsletter engine that sends via services like Resend or Postmark with no per-subscriber cost.
AI is used throughout the stack. We use it to write initial code, generate test cases, analyze performance and suggest security improvements. The customer sees the result as a more polished system delivered in less time.
- One interface for website, CMS, CRM and bookings
- One database where all customer data lives
- One login, one admin area, one support contact
- No extra cost per user or subscriber
- You own the code, data and domain
When SaaS is still the right answer
This doesn’t mean SaaS is dead. For standardized processes like accounting, payroll or transactional email, tools like Fortnox and Resend still serve their purpose. Building your own accounting system is still a poor use of time.
But when it comes to customer relationships, the equation flips. The website, newsletter, booking flow and customer portal are what build the brand, drive recurring revenue and make a difference in conversion. Custom is now both cheaper and better there.
A first step
The first step is rarely a big migration. It’s an inventory. Which tools are used today, what do they cost together, and what is actually used. That exercise alone usually shows that at least a third of subscriptions can be canceled without anyone noticing.
The next step is concrete mapping of which modules would benefit from being connected. From there we calculate a one-time investment and compare it to what the SaaS stack will cost over three years. In eight out of ten cases the custom system wins.
Want to see what it would look like for your business? Book a free consultation. We review your current setup, run the numbers and show what a custom system could do for the operation.