Custom Software vs SaaS Subscription: Why Owning Wins
A real estate agent in Orange County was paying over $200 a month for outdated website software. He had no online presence after nearly two decades with his website, weak SEO, and no blog to show for the monthly SaaS, and, worst of all, the platform was selling content space on his website to someone else who, unbeknownst to him, was posting mediocre prose to promote their industry-adjacent offerings, all while pocketing the double-dipping difference.
That story is the clearest example I've got of the custom software vs SaaS subscription cost problem small business owners are dealing with right now. I've felt for a while that SaaS is a dying model, and this put the nail in the coffin for me.
A Real Estate Agent Was Paying $200 a Month for Almost Nothing
When I started working with the Orange County client back in May, he was essentially getting nothing in return for the monthly fees he paid. He just figured it was the cost of running a website; it wasn’t. He didn't have much more than a few pages and an intake form; certainly no SEO strategy at play nor an optimized blog to support it. The site was ancient, and the platform made no effort to update his backend to reflect modern-day search engine optimization, sitemap indexing, or AI visibility files; essentially, robots.txt.
As part of our engagement, I built him a new website, an intake form with automated responses and notifications, and set him up with the autoblog system. Now his website, in addition to taking a 30% jump in SEO score, allows him to easily share his expertise through a few-minute voice memo that turns into a fully optimized blog post.
He's now building authority and trust with Google, which is the whole game for modern web discoverability. And he’s saving over $200 a month doing it.
SaaS Is Generic, but Your Business Isn't
Here are the core problems with SaaS.
It's built to serve everyone, which means it doesn't serve anyone specifically, or particularly well. And what happens is you end up paying extra to adapt it, or you pull in more tools to patch the gaps. Those extra tools usually have their own SaaS models running behind them too. So you end up stacking subscriptions just to get functionality a custom system would have baked in from the beginning. This is the real question behind owning your software vs subscription: Do you want something generic that you rent forever, or something built for exactly what you do? With custom software, you get something tailored to your actual use case, not a template that everyone else is using, just with your logo, industry, and ICP tacked on it.
Its main purpose is the platform’s bottom line, not adding value to its customers. In addition to working with my clients, I help my wife with the operations side of her art business. She’s expanding into limited-edition prints and needs high-quality image files to do that. So, I signed her up for a platform that lets her ship image files that can be expanded to 2-10x their original size without losing quality. That platform offers a monthly SaaS plan, yet you get limited credits. I understand this to some degree because these platforms incur costs, and they can’t let a single power user blow their API calls out of the water. But what irks me is that the credits don’t roll over. So even though the usage model is really based on a number of file conversions, they trap you in a monthly billing cycle when it could easily be pay-per-use. You purchase credits as you need them and top up when you run out. If the platform is truly valuable, they’ll get plenty of customers on that basis alone. Yet most SaaS models don’t work this way, and it seems disingenuous in many instances. This is why I now design anti-SaaS systems.
How I’m Ditching My Own SaaS Habit
Not all SaaS is bad. For certain things, like a custom email address linked to a domain, you just got to bite the bullet. And some platforms also hold their value each month, so it's worth the lock-in. Anthropic’s platform is one SaaS I think is worth it because I use it daily and derive value from it for myself, my wife, and my clients. But I've lived the doldrums of SaaS too; I'm not just telling clients to drop their tech subscriptions while I sit on ten myself. I have made a concerted effort to navigate away from many pricing models like this. For example, I started out using Replit for coding but quickly realized you don't need tools like that. Instead, I use Claude Code, which is included with my overall Anthropic subscription, and I build myself custom software for almost anything: lead generation tools, podcast guest outreach and booking, custom email campaign generation, and daily news updates, to name a few. That's the “own it myself” vs. renting software playing out in my own tech stack, with one subscription doing what used to require several separate SaaS fees. I'm not paying for extra tools I don't need anymore, and my clients don't have to either. While there is an upfront cost with owning your systems, just like purchasing a house rather than taking on a mortgage, it will save you in the long run.
Custom Software Used to Cost Six Figures Now It Doesn't
Custom software used to run tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, which kept it out of reach for most small business owners. But now, in the age of AI coding, you can get something custom-built for three to five thousand dollars. And don’t let the fact that someone isn't a diplomaed or certified software engineer or developer deter you from hiring them; anyone who takes themselves seriously as such is using coding agents. No one is doing it all themselves anymore. As with a lot of AI disruption, the skill set is moving up the knowledge hierarchy. Software development is all about planning, systems architecture, and software design.
And the pricing models are shifting too. Custom software is closing in on SaaS subscription cost because building something specific to your business or use case doesn't require the budget it once did.
Take our autoblog system as an example. You pay $1,800 upfront, which pays for itself in 4 or 5 months; a digital marketing firm will lock you into $500/month for 4 blogs. Then the system just runs, indefinitely, for years. You really own something at that point, and you're not locked into a monthly bill for the rest of your business's life.
The But Who Handles Updates Objection
I saw a debate about this on LinkedIn recently. The main argument for SaaS was maintenance and updates, the assumption being you need a subscription model so someone's always fixing things. I don't buy it. As someone who builds software and makes changes to numerous production systems each week, I know you can push updates to deployed software pretty quickly and easily.
For my done-for-you systems, I push changes directly to the repos and they auto-deploy. Nobody needs to pay extra for that.
That maintenance argument isn't really about service, though. SaaS models are designed to lock people in and make lots of money over a longer period, and that's the business model. It's not about taking better care of the client.
This is where the custom automation system's cost actually wins in the long term. No recurring fee tied to every update. You pay once, you own it, and updates come to you.
My Take on “Own It” Custom Software vs “Rent It” SaaS Subscription
If you're an owner staring down a stack of monthly SaaS bills for tools that half serve you, I get it. That was the real estate agent's whole situation before we fixed it.
I've written about this before in a piece on whether you're renting a template or building infrastructure, and the conclusion is the same one I keep landing on. Owning beats renting.
If you think a no-subscription model sounds too good to be true, it’s not, and I’m happy to discuss it in more detail with you.
