General
Paying for ten tools and using three features of each
Most small businesses pay for ten or more SaaS tools and use 10 to 15 percent of each one.
I build the slice you actually use as one system you own, usually as a Consolidate build at $20,000.
What this usually looks like
A CRM like HubSpot or Salesforce, a scheduler like Calendly, an accounting tool for invoicing, a form builder like Jotform, a project tool like Asana or Trello, and Slack to ask where things are. Each one bills per seat, every month.
In the middle sits a spreadsheet that ties it all together, and one person who knows how it works. That person spends a few hours a week copying data from one tool into the next.
Do the math on your own stack: ten tools at $40 a seat for 12 people is $4,800 a month, before anyone re-types anything.
Why it got this way
Every tool solved a real problem the day you bought it. Nobody bought ten at once. You added them one at a time, and each one made sense on its own.
Nobody owns the whole picture. Each tool has an admin, but no one is responsible for how the data moves between them, so the gaps get filled by people.
The fix, three ways
Connect, $5,000
keep the tools, fix the plumbing
Keep every tool and fix how they talk. For $5,000, I connect up to three systems so the re-typing stops, with alerts when a sync fails. It is the wrong choice if half the tools are not earning their seat, because then you are paying to connect waste.
Consolidate, $20,000
one app for the daily work, keep what still earns its place
For $20,000, I build one app for the work your team does every day and retire the tools it replaces. The tools that still earn their place stay, and the app talks to them. It is the wrong choice if fewer than about five people use these tools daily.
Replace, $75,000 to $100,000
rebuild the part of the big platform you actually use
If one big platform is most of your bill and your team lives in three of its screens, I rebuild those screens as software you own, for $75,000 to $100,000. It is the wrong choice if the platform genuinely fits and the pain is the tools around it.
What it looks like when it's done
Spark replaced four tools and a payroll done by hand in Excel. It saves BigDog Solar 20+ hours a week of manual work and roughly $60,000 a year, and billing issues now live in 1 system instead of 3. BigDog had 150+ reps and 15 admins spread across tools that almost fit.
Read more: Spark for BigDog Solar.
When you should not do this
If your stack costs under roughly $500 a month and nothing is re-typed by hand, leave it alone. It works.
If fewer than about five people touch these tools every day, a custom build rarely pays back. And if one existing all-in-one tool already does the job, buy that instead.
Questions about this
How do I know which SaaS tools to cut?
List every tool, what it costs per month, and what your team actually does in it each week. The ones where the answer is "one or two screens" are candidates. Discovery does this properly with the people who use them, but the list alone usually makes the answer obvious.
Is custom software cheaper than SaaS subscriptions?
Not always. Add up the subscriptions a build would retire, plus the hours spent re-typing between them, and compare that with the build price and support plan. In my view, owning beats renting after year two, mostly because of the hours.
What happens to the tools I keep?
They stay, and the new system talks to them. My rule is that if a tool earns its keep, I connect to it instead of rebuilding it. Accounting software is a common one that stays.