Stuart Totterdell
Technical Director
Every month, your business pays for SaaS platforms that were designed by someone who has never seen your operation, built for requirements that were defined by a product manager in another country, and updated according to a roadmap that is driven by the vendor's largest customers - who are not you.
You pay for this monthly. Without question. Without negotiation. Without any real ability to influence what happens next.
And every year, the price goes up.
The subscription creep problem
SaaS pricing increases are not occasional. They are structural. Most SaaS vendors raise prices annually - typically between five and fifteen percent. Some rebrand the increase as a "platform enhancement fee." Others introduce it as a new pricing tier that happens to cost more than the one you are on.
The effect compounds. A platform that costs £600 per month today will cost £780 per month in three years at eight percent annual increases. In five years, over £880. In seven years, over £1,000. The platform has not changed in any way that benefits your specific operation. The price has increased by sixty-seven percent.
And you have no leverage. The vendor knows your data is in their system. Your team is trained on their interface. Your processes are built around their workflow. Switching costs are enormous. So they raise prices with confidence, knowing that the pain of paying more is less than the pain of leaving.
This is not a flaw in the SaaS model. It is the SaaS model.
Features you pay for but do not use
SaaS platforms are built for the broadest possible market. They add features to attract new customers, retain existing ones, and justify price increases. Most of these features are irrelevant to your business.
Your operations team uses four of the twenty-three modules in your project management platform. Your finance team uses the core invoicing function and ignores the analytics suite, the forecasting module, and the AI assistant that was added in the last update. Your CRM has capabilities that your sales team has never enabled and will never need.
You pay for all of it. The pricing model does not allow you to pay for what you use. You pay for what exists. And what exists is determined by the vendor's product roadmap - which is driven by the needs of their largest, most vocal customers, their competitive positioning against other vendors, and their investors' expectations for feature growth.
Your needs - the specific, contextual, operational requirements of your particular business - are a rounding error in that equation.
The workflow problem
Every SaaS platform imposes a workflow. It has opinions about how data should be entered, how processes should flow, how approvals should work, and how reports should be structured.
These opinions are based on averages. The vendor has studied how most businesses do things and built a system that accommodates the middle of the bell curve. If your business operates at the middle of the bell curve, the workflow fits. If it does not - and most mid-market businesses do not - you have three options.
Adapt your operation to fit the vendor's workflow. This means changing how your team works to accommodate someone else's design decisions. It feels like a compromise at first. Over time, it becomes an embedded constraint that limits how the operation can evolve.
Customise the platform to fit your operation. This means paying for configuration, custom fields, and workarounds that make the platform behave differently from its default - without the rigour of proper development and build. It is expensive, fragile, and resets every time the vendor releases a major update.
Work around the limitations. This means the team builds manual processes, spreadsheets, and email-based handoffs to bridge the gap between what the platform does and what the business needs. The SaaS becomes the official system. The workarounds become the real system.
None of these options is satisfactory. All of them are inevitable when you rent a generic solution for a specific problem.
What you are actually paying for
Strip away the marketing and you are paying for three things.
Hosting. Someone runs the servers, manages the infrastructure, and keeps the platform available. This is a genuine service, but the cost of hosting a modern application is a fraction of what you pay in subscription fees. The hosting cost for most mid-market SaaS usage is pennies per user per month.
Development. Someone builds new features, fixes bugs, and maintains the codebase. This is valuable - but the development is directed by the vendor's priorities, not yours. You are funding their roadmap. The features they build may benefit your business. They may not. You have no say.
Margin. SaaS businesses typically operate at sixty to eighty percent gross margins. For every pound you pay, twenty to forty pence goes to the service and sixty to eighty pence goes to the vendor's profit, sales team, marketing, and investors. You are funding their growth as much as your operation.
There is nothing wrong with a profitable business. But when you understand that most of your subscription fee is not going to the infrastructure or the features you use - it is going to the vendor's expansion plans - the value equation looks different.
The alternative
The alternative is not to eliminate SaaS from your business. For commodity functions - email, storage, communication - SaaS is efficient and appropriate.
The alternative is to stop renting core operational infrastructure. The processes that define how your business runs, that handle your specific data, that follow your specific rules - these belong inside your own IT and process strategy, not inside a vendor whose priorities are not yours.
Build what is core. Subscribe to what is commodity. The distinction is straightforward, and independent tech consultancy usually lands in the same place: when you account for the total cost of the subscription, the cost of adaptation, and the value of owning an asset versus renting a platform, the financial case is almost always in favour of building.
Your SaaS bill is not a technology cost. It is a monthly payment for someone else's vision of how your business should work. And every year, that payment goes up.
