Custom Software

I Was Spending €45K/Year on SaaS Before I Built My Own

I ran a cafe before I ran a software company. Still do, actually.

And here's the thing nobody tells you about running a small business: your biggest enemy isn't your competition. It's your software.

I was paying for 12 different SaaS tools. Twelve. CRM, project management, invoicing, scheduling, email marketing, analytics — the whole circus. Every month, same bill. Every new hire, another licence. Every quarter, another price increase I didn't agree to.

The worst part? My team used maybe 20% of what we paid for. The rest was bloat. Features nobody asked for, buttons nobody clicks, dashboards nobody looks at.

I did the maths once. Over three years, I spent roughly €45,000 on SaaS subscriptions. For tools that still couldn't talk to each other. For data that still lived in five different places. For a "system" that broke every time someone joined or left the team.

That's when I started building custom software. Not for clients — for myself first.

The per-seat trap is real

Here's what really grinds my gears about SaaS pricing: it punishes you for growing.

You hire five people? Great, your business is doing well! Here's a 30% price increase. Oh, and you crossed from 25 to 26 users? That's an "Enterprise" tier now. Welcome to a completely different pricing bracket.

I talked to a logistics company in Rotterdam last month. They had 30 employees and were paying €60,000 a year for their SaaS stack. Sixty thousand. For a logistics company. That's not software — that's a second rent payment.

And here's the kicker: the average SaaS app is used at 43% of its features. You're paying full price for less than half the product.

There's another way

Custom software used to mean "hire 10 developers and wait 18 months." That was true five years ago. It's not true anymore.

AI-assisted development changed everything. A small team — like, 2-3 experienced engineers — can now build in 4 weeks what used to take 6 months. And the cost? Fraction of what it was.

But here's what matters more than speed: you own it. No monthly fees. No per-seat penalties. No vendor deciding to discontinue the feature you depend on. It's your code, your data, your rules.

I built my first custom system for my cafe. Replaced three SaaS tools, cost me about what two months of subscriptions would have. It's been running for 18 months now. Zero monthly fees. My team actually likes using it because it was built around their workflow, not some product manager's idea of what our workflow should be.

The SaaS treadmill only works if you never plan to grow. If you do — there's a better option.

Your Business Runs on Spreadsheets. That's a Problem.

Let me guess. You have a spreadsheet that runs your business. Maybe it's tracking orders. Maybe it's managing inventory. Maybe it's your "CRM" — a fancy name for a spreadsheet with customer names and phone numbers. Maybe you have several. Maybe someone calls

Custom Software Costs Less Than Your SaaS Stack. Here's the Receipt.

Two years ago, if you told a small business owner "you should build custom software," they'd laugh at you. "I can barely afford my current tools" was the standard response. And they were right. Custom software used to be a €50,000–€100,000

Your SaaS Vendor's Data Processing Agreement Is 47 Pages. I Read One.

Quick question: where does your customer data live right now? I mean actually live. Not where you think it lives — where is it physically stored? Whose servers? Which country? Whose employees can access it at 2am on a Tuesday? I asked this to a Dutch healthcare company last year. They

The €37K Software Bill Nobody Told You About

I'll let you in on a dirty secret about SaaS pricing. It's not about the sticker price. It's about everything around the sticker price that never shows up on the pricing page. I had a client — a mid-sized Dutch manufacturer — who thought they were