Why renting software is ending for mid-sized companies, and what to build instead

Rented software made sense when building your own cost too much. It doesn't cost that anymore. Here is what we think a mid-sized company should still rent, and what it should own.

Hire one more person and your software bill goes up. Nothing about the software changed. You got bigger, and the vendor charges by the seat.

That's the deal with rented software, the kind the industry calls SaaS. For a long time it was a fair deal. Building your own cost too much. A custom system meant a development shop, a long contract and a result that was out of date the day it shipped. Renting was the sane choice. We rented too.

We think that deal is ending for mid-sized companies. The vendors didn't get worse. Building got cheap.

What changed

AI now writes a lot of the routine code. A small team can build what used to take a software department. That changes the math on the quoting tool your estimator fights with, and on the CRM that's really a contact list with a monthly fee.

You probably have one tool like that. You pay for it every month, and the real work runs from a spreadsheet beside it.

What renting costs you besides the fee

Your data sits in the vendor's database, in the vendor's shape. You can export it, but what comes out is a pile of files no other tool reads cleanly. Leaving becomes a project, so you stay.

The roadmap is theirs. If the vendor gets bought, raises the price or drops the feature you depend on, you find out by email.

The bill grows in a way that's hard to see, too. One tool is cheap. But you don't have one. You have a tool for quotes, one for scheduling, one for reviews, and a CRM that's supposed to tie them together and doesn't. Add them up once, across every seat.

And now every vendor sells an AI add-on. Each one sees only its own slice of your business. The quoting tool's AI doesn't know what's in your inbox. The CRM's AI doesn't know what's in your books. You end up paying several vendors for several assistants, and none of them knows your company.

What to build instead

Don't rebuild everything. We rent our email, and we'll never build a payroll system.

We use one test. If the software works the same way for every company, rent it. If your way of doing the job is part of why customers pick you, own the tool that does it.

Start with your data. Get your customers, your quotes and your job history into one database that you own. It doesn't have to be fancy. It has to be yours.

Then build the one tool your team bends around the most. It's usually the one with the side spreadsheet. Build it to fit how your crew already works, and have it read from your database.

Then add agents, with a person approving. An agent that drafts the follow-up on every open quote is worth more than another dashboard. It can only do that if it can read your data. So the database comes first.

We did this to ourselves first

The scheduler on this site is ours. So is the inbox our advisors work from, and the dialer inside it. We used to rent a booking tool. We replaced it because we wanted every booked call to land in our own CRM.

We've gotten it wrong too. We built a cockpit for our own advisors, decided it was the wrong shape, and threw it out for a different build.

Where an integrator fits

You can hire developers and do this yourself. Some companies should.

What an integrator brings is having done it before. We know which jobs to build first and what to keep renting. We know how to get your data out of the old tools without losing the history. We do that work for small businesses, the lower middle market and the middle market.

Before we build anything, we scope it against the number it should move. If it won't move one, we don't build it.

If you want to talk through your own stack, talk to the team. Bring the tool with the side spreadsheet.

Want to talk through a build for your company?

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