Pull your list of SaaS subscriptions. It is longer than you think. Most businesses we work with have between 20 and 80 SaaS tools, counting the small ones. Finance knows the top 10. Nobody has a full inventory.
Add up the subscription cost. That is the visible number. It is usually already big enough that the CFO winces.
Now add the hidden costs.
Integration tax. Every tool has to talk to at least two others. Somebody built and maintains those integrations. Zapier. iPaaS. Custom middleware. This is ongoing labor, and it is rarely tracked as a line item.
Data tax. Your customer data exists in 15 places. Each place has a slightly different version of the truth. Reconciling them is ops work. Analysing across them is data engineering work. Every report that needs data from multiple tools costs time that nobody budgets for.
Context switching tax. Your people have to log into 15 different tools. Each tool has its own UI conventions, notifications, permissions, and quirks. The cognitive load of context switching is documented in research as a real productivity killer, and it is invisible to most org charts.
Vendor management tax. Each tool has a renewal, a contract, a price increase you have to fight. Each one has an onboarding story for every new hire. Each one has a sunset story when you replace it.
Put all of these together and the true cost of your SaaS stack is usually 3 to 5 times the subscription cost. The CFO sees the tip of the iceberg.
This does not mean replace all SaaS with custom. It means scrutinize the tail. The bottom 20 of your 80 tools, the ones with a handful of users and a specific purpose. A lot of them are replaceable by a small custom tool that consolidates 3 or 4 of them into one. That is where custom software earns its keep.
We have done this audit for clients and the replacement tools are usually small. A 400-line internal app replaces three SaaS subscriptions. The annual savings alone pay for the build in the first year. After that it is all upside.