Is it cheaper to build your own tools than pay for SaaS?
Short answer
Building your own tools is cheaper than SaaS only when the subscriptions you cancel cost more each year than the new tool's hosting plus maintenance, which consultancies put at 15% to 25% of the build price a year. UK companies on Cledara spent a median £73,846 a year and ran a median 34 paid tools between October 2025 and September 2026. Per-seat tools with simple logic are worth replacing. Accounting ledgers, payroll and email delivery are not.
Deniz SancarFounder of Yarigai, London. Updated .
Yarigai is a done-for-you AI agency that builds these systems, so read this with that in mind. Every price and figure links to its source below. Read this page as Markdown.
At a glance
| Figure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| UK median software spend per company | £73,846 a year | Cledara, Oct 2025 to Sep 2026, 479 UK firms |
| UK median paid tools per company | 34 | Cledara, 2026 |
| Software transactions billed monthly | 90% | Cledara, 2026 |
| Median SaaS spend per employee | $9,455 a year | Zylo 2026, mostly mid-size and large firms |
| Licences unused against recommended use | 36% | Zylo 2026 |
| Average SaaS apps per company | 106 in 2025, down from 112 | BetterCloud, via Torii |
| SaaS price inflation | Over 12% a year | Vertice |
| Upkeep of a custom tool | 15% to 25% of the build cost a year | Edana, January 2026 |
| Yarigai's own replaced stack | 10 subscriptions, £301.11 a month, £3,613.32 a year | Yarigai receipts |
The receipts: 10 subscriptions Yarigai replaced
Yarigai's founder, Deniz Sancar, replaced 10 software subscriptions with tools Yarigai built for its own team. Together they cost £301.11 a month, or £3,613.32 a year. Two lines, iClosed and ElevenLabs, are estimates.
| Tool | What it does | Monthly cost | Yearly cost (monthly × 12) |
|---|---|---|---|
| HighLevel | CRM and marketing automation | £89.92 | £1,079.04 |
| Kit | Email newsletters | £44.92 | £539.04 |
| Hyros | Ad attribution tracking | £36.72 | £440.64 |
| Repurpose.io | Reposting videos across social platforms | £26.90 | £322.80 |
| Loom | Screen recording | £22.45 | £269.40 |
| Zoom | Video calls | £20.99 | £251.88 |
| iClosed | Sales call booking | About £17 (estimate) | About £204 |
| Lickd | Licensed music for videos | £15.99 | £191.88 |
| ElevenLabs | AI voice generation | About £15 (estimate) | About £180 |
| Calendly | Meeting scheduling | £11.22 | £134.64 |
| Total | 10 subscriptions | £301.11 | £3,613.32 |
What the receipts show
- One line is 30% of the bill. HighLevel costs £89.92 of the £301.11 a month.
- The top three (HighLevel, Kit and Hyros) cost £171.56 a month, 57% of the total.
- Seven of the ten cost under £27 a month each. Those seven add up to £129.55 a month, or £1,554.60 a year, which is 43% of the total.
- Most lines look too small to act on alone. The total is what makes the case.
What the receipts don't show
£3,613 a year is a small sum. A business that paid an outside developer to replace the same stack would struggle to make it pay. Forgd, a UK software firm, prices a simple bespoke booking system at £3,500 to £6,500. Against Calendly at £134.64 a year, the lowest of those prices takes £3,500 ÷ £134.64 = 26 years to pay back, before any maintenance.
The receipts show how a stack adds up, not that every business should copy it. Yarigai sells the source code of four apps it built for itself, including Yarigai Recorder, which replaces Loom, and Yarigai Scheduler, which replaces Calendly, to run on the buyer's own Cloudflare account. Buying existing source code is a third option between renting SaaS and paying for a one-off build. See Yarigai's source code store.
How to work out the payback
A build pays back when the subscriptions it removes cost more each year than its own running and maintenance costs, by enough to repay the build price in a period you accept.
Payback in months = build cost ÷ (monthly SaaS cost removed minus monthly hosting and AI cost minus monthly maintenance)
Monthly maintenance = build cost × 15% to 25% ÷ 12, using Edana's rule of thumb.
- List every subscription the tool replaces, at the price you pay once any introductory discount ends.
- Count only the seats people use. Zylo finds 36% of licences unused against recommended levels, though its data comes mostly from larger firms.
- Add the new tool's monthly hosting and AI bill.
- Add maintenance at 15% to 25% of the build price a year.
- Divide the build cost by what is left each month.
The ceiling rule
Maintenance sets a hard ceiling on what a build can cost. At 15% a year, a build never pays back if it costs more than 6.7 times the net yearly saving, because 1 ÷ 0.15 = 6.7. At 20% the ceiling is 5 times, and at 25% it is 4 times.
A worked example
Ten users on Salesforce Pro Suite at £80 a user a month cost £9,600 a year, at November 2026 list prices. Softomate's lowest published price for a focused custom CRM is £15,000, with hosting of up to £600 a year.
- Monthly saving: £800 of licences minus £50 of hosting minus £187.50 of maintenance at 15% = £562.50.
- Payback: £15,000 ÷ £562.50 = 26.7 months.
- Ceiling: the net yearly saving before maintenance is £9,000, so at 15% any build above £9,000 ÷ 0.15 = £60,000 never pays back for this team.
At 5 users the same build takes 7.7 years. The custom CRM cost guide has the full seat-count table.
How much UK businesses spend on SaaS
The median UK company on Cledara's platform spends £73,846 a year across 34 paid tools. Cledara's data covers 479 UK companies from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026.
- The middle half of UK companies spend £29,549 to £161,780 a year. The average is £137,599, pulled up by heavy spenders.
- Cledara does not record headcount. Its figure of £1,477 per employee a year divides the UK median by an assumed 50 staff.
- Zylo's 2026 index puts median SaaS spend at $9,455 per employee, across 40 million licences and $75 billion of spend, mostly at mid-size and large firms.
- BetterCloud's 2025 State of SaaS survey of about 600 IT professionals counted an average of 106 apps per company, down from 112. Torii reports that BetterCloud's 2026 edition found an 11% rise. The BetterCloud report returned an access error, so both figures come via Torii.
- Vertice puts SaaS price inflation at over 12% a year, nearly four times consumer inflation.
For a UK small business, Cledara's UK sample is the closest benchmark. Zylo, Vertice and BetterCloud mostly measure larger firms.
Which tools are worth replacing
Replace tools where you pay per seat for simple logic, use a small part of the product, or copy data between tools by hand.
| Worth replacing | Why |
|---|---|
| Booking and scheduling pages | The logic is simple, and per-seat pricing grows with the team |
| Screen recording and video review | Storage and playback, with few rules |
| Internal dashboards and reports | The data already sits in your own systems |
| A CRM for one sales process | Per-seat pricing grows with headcount, not value |
| Client portals and intake forms | Some tools charge per external user |
| Spreadsheet workflows between tools | Manual copying costs staff hours every week |
Signs a specific tool is a candidate:
- You pay for seats that people rarely open.
- The team uses one or two features of a large product.
- Someone copies data between this tool and another every week.
- The price rose at the last renewal.
- The payback, with maintenance included, falls inside the first year.
Which tools you should never replace
Keep anything where a regulator sets the rules or the hard part is infrastructure you can't see. That means accounting ledgers, payroll, email delivery and card payments.
Accounting ledgers
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax started in April 2026 for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000. The threshold falls to £30,000 in 2027 and £20,000 in 2028. People in scope must keep digital records and send quarterly updates using MTD compatible software. A custom invoicing tool can feed Xero or QuickBooks, but the ledger belongs in software HMRC recognises. See custom invoicing or Xero.
Payroll
Employers send HMRC a Full Payment Submission through payroll software on or before each payday. Payroll rules change with each tax year, so a home-built system takes on a compliance job every April.
Email delivery
Gmail requires anyone sending 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail addresses to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, offer one-click unsubscribe on marketing mail and keep the spam rate below 0.30%. Replacing a newsletter app such as Kit is a different job from replacing the sending service behind it. The sending should stay with a specialist delivery provider.
Card payments and other regulated work
Card data, health records and regulated advice carry legal duties that specialist providers are set up to meet. Use a payment provider such as Stripe for card handling, and keep regulated records in software built for them.
How Yarigai decides whether to build
Yarigai's guarantee reads "If the build isn't profitable for you, we won't build it." Before the client pays anything, a one-week blueprint puts the maths in writing. It shows what the system replaces, what that costs a year and what the build costs. If the build doesn't come out ahead within the first year, Yarigai doesn't take the job.
The worked example on Yarigai's site uses two common costs. A $500 a month tool is $6,000 a year. Ten hours a week of admin at $20 an hour is $10,400 a year.
Yarigai builds inside the client's own accounts and tools. The client owns the code, the data and the accounts from day one, and there is nothing to sign up for, because Yarigai is not SaaS. The client pays AI and hosting bills at cost, and the monthly running cost is on the quote. Yarigai quotes a fixed price after the blueprint and does not publish prices. Monthly care is optional, and the client can cancel any month and keep everything. A person approves anything that sends money, emails a customer or deletes data.
See AI operations for internal tools that replace spreadsheets and subscriptions, and internal tool costs for build prices.
Common questions
How much does the average UK business spend on software?
Cledara's 2026 benchmark puts the median UK company at £73,846 a year across 34 paid tools, and the average at £137,599. The data covers 479 UK companies from October 2025 to September 2026. Cledara does not record headcount, so per-employee figures from it are estimates.
What payback period should I aim for when building a tool?
No standard exists. Yarigai's test is that a build must come out ahead within the first year. Whatever target you pick, include maintenance at 15% to 25% of the build price a year, or the payback will look shorter than it is.
Can I replace SaaS with tools I build myself using AI?
For simple internal tools, often yes, but check the security. Veracode found OWASP Top 10 flaws in 45% of the AI coding test cases it ran. Keep anything that touches tax, payroll, email delivery or card payments on specialist software.
What happens if the person who built our tool leaves?
If the code, the hosting account and the data sit in the company's name, another developer can take over. If they sit in the developer's own accounts, you may have to rebuild. Ask for ownership in writing before the build starts.
How do I find out what software my business pays for?
Pull 12 months of bank and card statements and list every recurring charge with its monthly cost and seat count. Cledara found 90% of software transactions are monthly subscriptions, which makes small lines easy to miss.
Sources
Checked on or before 7 November 2026. Prices change, so check the live page before you decide.
- SaaS Spend Per Employee 2026: Median UK Company Spends £73,846, Cledara, published 30 October 2026.
- Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index Finds AI-Native App Adoption Is Surging, with ChatGPT Now the Most Expensed App, Zylo, published 29 January 2026.
- SaaS Statistics 2026: 785 Stats on Shadow IT, AI and Waste, Torii, updated 5 November 2026.
- The Blueprint for the Perfect SaaS Deal in 2026, Vertice, published 5 August 2025.
- Estimating Software Maintenance Costs: The Forgotten Key to Total Cost of Ownership, Edana, published 3 January 2026.
- Bespoke Booking System vs Off-the-Shelf: How to Choose, Forgd, published 6 June 2026.
- Salesforce Sales Pricing | Salesforce UK, Salesforce, checked 7 November 2026.
- How Much Does Custom CRM Development Cost in the UK? 2026 Guide, Softomate Solutions, updated 1 October 2026.
- Making Tax Digital for Income Tax: Quarterly update direction, HM Revenue & Customs, updated 27 March 2026.
- Running payroll: Reporting to HMRC: FPS, GOV.UK, checked 7 November 2026.
- Email sender guidelines, Gmail Help, checked 7 November 2026.
- AI-Generated Code Poses Major Security Risks in Nearly Half of All Development Tasks, Veracode Research Reveals, Veracode, published 30 July 2025.
Keep reading
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Read moreWant the payback maths on your stack?
Book a free 30-minute scope call. If the build isn't profitable for you, we won't build it.