- Canceling everything is not the strategy. Ownership of the core is.
- Vendors are feature-cramming to justify the price. That is their problem.
- Open source and agents made a mid-market swap possible in days, not years.
The first objection is always the same. "So you want us to cancel Salesforce." No. UnSaaSing is not a swap-and-replace exercise, and it is not a 40-tool teardown on day one.
Raphael Bennett, Co-Founder and Principal at REV Global, is blunt about the other side of the table. SaaS companies are feature-cramming to justify the price, and forcing clients into new tools to survive. That is not your strategy. Your strategy is rented infrastructure to owned infrastructure: keep what is cheap, own what is core.
Not a teardown
Some layers should stay rented. Commodity utilities with low data gravity and honest pricing are usually fine as subscriptions. The mistake is treating the operating system the same way: CRM, inventory, the customer record, the workflow that turns demand into cash. Those are the layers that should accrete to you, not to a vendor's cap table. We made that split in what UnSaaSing actually means.
Why now, not five years ago
Five years ago this was a science project. The cores did not exist in a form a mid-market team could run. Open source got good enough. Agents now ship features faster than a vendor roadmap. You are no longer waiting on how a landlord allocates product resources.
That inflection is why this conversation is happening now. It is also why waiting a few more years is not a free option. Competitors who already moved will have cost and velocity you do not.
Spec it. Ship it.
The unlock is operational, not ideological. Need a change? Spec it. Implement it in a few days. That sentence is the whole difference between owning the system and leasing it.
You do not get there by ripping out every logo. You get there by picking the workflow that makes revenue, putting it on rails you control, and proving it in parallel with the old system. Next in this series: what sprawl actually costs once you look past the subscription line.
UnSaaSing in practice, part 3 of 8. Previous: How Do You Know You Have Too Much Software? · Next: What SaaS Sprawl Actually Costs