- Buying a SaaS tool is renting someone else's infrastructure.
- You get a messy export and a roadmap you do not control.
- Own the workflows that make revenue. Cheap and replaceable can stay rented.
When you buy a SaaS tool, you are renting someone else's infrastructure. You get permission to use a product built for everyone, a messy export if you leave, and a roadmap you do not control. That is the lease. UnSaaSing is taking that relationship from rent to own.
This is the first in a short series drawn from a conversation with Raphael Bennett, Co-Founder and Principal at REV Global. It is the practitioner version of the argument we laid out in UnSaaSed and the leaky bucket: own the workflows that make revenue, and rent the rest.
Stop leasing the operating system
The operating system of a mid-market company is not the logo wall. It is how orders become cash, how customers are remembered, how inventory, finance, and follow-up talk to each other. When that system is rented, every change waits on a landlord. The product is optimized for the vendor's next funding round, not for your shop floor.
That is fine for tools you can swap in a week. It is expensive for the system the business actually runs on.
What you actually get when you rent
Three tells show up in almost every stack we look at.
- Data comes back as a spreadsheet, not as a system you can keep running.
- Changes wait on how the vendor allocates product resources.
- The product is built for everyone, which means it is built for no one in particular.
None of that is a reason to cancel every subscription tomorrow. It is a reason to stop treating the operating system like a utility bill.
Own the workflows that make revenue
UnSaaSing is not "write your own Salesforce." Cheap and replaceable can stay rented: payroll, email hosting, commodity utilities with honest pricing. The operating system should not. When you own the core, you spec a change and ship it in days instead of waiting on a roadmap.
Five years ago this was a science project. Open source got good enough, and agents got fast enough, that a mid-market company can take control of the systems it actually needs. That is the reframe. The rest of this series is how you know you have too much software, what sprawl costs, how long a swap takes, and what a buyer will pay for when the stack is clean.
UnSaaSing in practice, part 1 of 8. Next: How Do You Know You Have Too Much Software?