Replacing a SaaS subscription with your own system: the 3-year math

01

The three lines on the bill

A subscription has one line that moves: unit × price. The unit is a seat, an order or a contact. The price moves at renewal.

Your own system has three lines:

1. Build, once. H2M builds start at 60,000 PLN, about €13,700 at the NBP rate of 25 September 2026 (4.375 PLN per euro). You pay in four stages: 30%, 30%, 25%, 15%. The audit before it costs 5,000 PLN and is deducted from the build.
2. Infrastructure, monthly, on your own account. Cloudflare's paid Workers plan starts at $5 a month per account, with 10 million requests included. The largest system in this article, an e-commerce hub with image storage, a server and an invoicing provider, was estimated at 250-400 PLN (about €60-90) a month, not counting the shop front-end's own subscription.
3. The plan, monthly. Opieka (care) at €350, Tor (a change lane) at €2,090 or Priorytet at €3,990.

The subscription has hidden lines too. HubSpot's Sales Hub Professional lists at $100 per seat per month billed monthly ($90 on an annual commitment), plus a required one-off onboarding fee of $1,500. And there is the work your team does beside the tool because the tool does not do it. That line is on no invoice, so most owners never price it.

02

Why the subscription line keeps rising

Vertice sells SaaS purchasing services, so it has an interest in the topic. It tracks price inflation across the more than $75bn of spend it processes. Its index stood at 12.1% in April 2026, 14.2% in May and 16.4% in June. Its 2026 report puts SaaS spend at $9,100 per employee in 2025, up from $7,900 in 2023.

Single vendors point the same way. Salesforce raised list prices for the Enterprise and Unlimited editions of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Field Service and some Industries Clouds by an average of 6% from 1 August 2025.

The model below uses a 10% uplift at each annual renewal. That is above Salesforce's 6% and below Vertice's June figure. Replace it with your own vendor's last increase.

03

The 36-month math, worked through

The example is a 25-person team that pays per seat for a CRM and a workflow tool. The assumptions, in euros:

• Subscription: €120 per seat per month in year one, so €3,000 a month. It goes up 10% in month 13 and again in month 25.
• Build: €30,000, a little over twice H2M's entry price, because a CRM plus workflow for 25 people is not a small system. Paid 30/30/25/15% in months 1-4.
• Overlap: the subscription runs through the four build months and stops from month 5. That assumes monthly cancellation, or a build that ends at your renewal date.
• From month 5: €100 a month hosting on your account, plus either Opieka at €350 or Tor at €2,090. Tor includes Opieka.
• Not counted: your staff's time on the migration, the manual work beside the subscription and any exit fee.

What the chart shows after 36 months:

• Subscription: €119,160.
• Own system with Opieka: €56,400. The lines cross in month 16. By month 36 you have spent €62,760 less.
• Own system with Tor every month: €112,080. The lines cross in month 32. The saving over three years is €7,080.

If the system mostly needs to keep running, the build pays back in about 16 months. If you want a change lane open every month for three years, the cost is about the same as the subscription: you pay for fit and ownership, not for a saving. Both are fair reasons to build. Know which one you are buying.

Note month 4: €42,000 spent on the own-system path, against €12,000 on the subscription. The cash goes out first; the saving comes later.

04

Per-order pricing: the case where the math said no

Base.com, formerly BaseLinker, is a multichannel e-commerce hub. Its public Business plan is a fixed fee plus a fee on every order:

• Poland: 279 PLN plus 0.99 PLN per order.
• Germany: €99 plus €0.19 per order.
• United States: $99 plus $0.49 per order.

Above 5,000 orders a month, or above a monthly GMV threshold (€250,000 in Germany, 1 million PLN in Poland, $300,000 in the US), the price is individual.

One of our clients, a Polish multichannel seller with about 3,000 orders a month, asked us to replace it. At the Polish list price, 3,000 orders a month cost 3,249 PLN (about €743), and 91% of that is the per-order fee. Over three years that is about €26,700. The build came to about €30,000. Add four months of hub fees during the build, then 32 months of Opieka and hosting, and the own system costs about €46,600 over the same three years. With Tor instead of Opieka, it would be about €102,000.

On the list price, the build does not pay back within three years, not even if the shop grows to 4,000 orders a month.

The client decided to build anyway. The reasons were not on the price list:

• The account was on the individually priced Enterprise tier, so the list price is only a floor. The hub's API has no billing data and we have not seen the invoice, so we claim no number.
• Order statuses stood in for a warehouse system. The team used "to be found" statuses to track which location an item had to be picked from. A system that records locations makes those statuses unnecessary.
• Most automation was tax logic: 14 of 18 automation rules were tax and document decisions. The hub also sent e-invoices to Poland's national e-invoicing system (KSeF), so leaving without a new invoicing path would have stopped sales, not just sync.
• Some work had no tool at all: checking cash-on-delivery payments, returns and parcels in transit.

The audit also found lock-in that had to be planned before anyone cancelled:

• Every product photo in a sample of 1,000 sat on the vendor's CDN, many hard-coded into listing descriptions. Cancel first, and the listings lose their images.
• Order history through the API went back about three months. The rest needed a panel export before the contract ended.
• One sales channel ran through a connector that exists only inside the hub. Without another route to that marketplace, it was the first blocker, not a footnote.

Per-order pricing grows in a straight line with sales. Here, though, the fee alone never justified leaving. The process did.

05

Per-seat pricing and tool sprawl

Per-seat pricing charges you for people. Adcare, an agency that markets clinics, had a site per clinic, a CRM for the agency, a CRM for each clinic, and a per-seat subscription for the workflow in between: three tools, three logins, and nobody owning the whole.

Now it runs on one codebase: a multi-tenant CMS with a tenant per clinic, and the agency CRM and the per-clinic CRM on one schema. The per-seat subscription is gone. A new clinic is a tenant, not a project. The schema has grown through 199 migrations without a rewrite, and 180 tools in its MCP server let the agency run it from Claude. It runs on the agency's own cloud account and repository. The full case is at /work/adcare.

Hosting does not scale with headcount. Cloudflare charges for requests and CPU time, not for users, so a new person costs a login, not a licence.

A second client, a publisher, had its magazine and its shop on two separate tools. We built one system to replace both: paywall, subscriptions, a shop with invoicing and shipping, newsletter and ads. We do not have its old subscription bills, so we make no savings claim.

06

What Klarna actually did

The most quoted example is Klarna. On a conference call in late August 2024, its CEO said the company had shut down Salesforce and would shut down Workday. Many headlines read it as AI replacing SaaS.

In December 2024 CX Today reported that Klarna had moved HR to Deel, another SaaS product. On the CRM, a Klarna spokesperson would not say what replaced it; CX Today described a mix of third-party and in-house tools. In March 2025 the CEO put it plainly: "So no, we did not replace SaaS with an LLM." What Klarna built was an internal layer, on a graph database, that joins scattered company data, with new interfaces on top.

Even the loudest example is consolidation plus some owned software. That is the realistic shape for a smaller company too: own the one or two systems where your process is the product, and keep renting the commodity tools.

Retool's 2026 Build vs. Buy report points the same way: 35% of teams have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom build, and 78% expect to build more custom internal tools in 2026. Retool sells a platform for building internal tools, and it surveyed 817 professionals in late 2025, so read it as a vendor survey.

07

When not to build

Building has become easy: in Retool's survey, 60% of respondents had built software outside IT oversight in the past year. Owning what you build is the part that gets skipped. Do not build if any of these is true:

• Three years of the subscription come to less than about €30,000. With 10% uplifts, that is a tool costing under about €750 a month today. The smallest system H2M builds costs about €29,900 over the same three years: €13,700 build, €12,600 for three years of Opieka and €3,600 of hosting at €100 a month. On price alone, stay and negotiate.
• The tool is a commodity where your process is like everyone else's: email, bookkeeping, payroll, video calls.
• Nobody inside will own it. Someone has to set the order of changes and accept them. If that person does not exist, a subscription is safer.
• You need a person on call at weekends. H2M plans respond Monday to Friday, 9:00-17:00 Warsaw time. Monitoring runs around the clock, but a weekend outage gets a person on Monday at 9:00. Weekend on-call is not for sale until a second engineer joins.
• You are early in a multi-year contract. Time the build to end at renewal, or you pay for both.
• Savings are the only goal, but your team will want Tor every month. Then the three-year cost is close to the subscription. Build for fit and ownership, or not at all.

08

What a predictable monthly plan covers

Each plan is a fixed monthly fee for one system, not a bundle of hours.

Opieka, €350 a month.

• Monitoring checks your critical paths every 5 minutes and opens a P1 incident after two failed checks.
• A database backup every day, so you lose at most 24 hours of data. The restore is tested every quarter and the result goes into the report.
• Up to two small changes a month (up to about two hours of work each), plus one small adjustment a month to vendor or legal changes announced at least 30 days ahead.
• In an outage, a person responds within 4 business hours and service is restored within 1 business day.
• A call every quarter. Minimum term 3 months.

Tor, €2,090 a month. Includes Opieka.

• One queue of changes. You set the order. One change is in progress at a time, and no change needs a separate quote.
• Once started, a small change is usually ready for your review in 1 business day (at most 2), a medium one in 3, a large one in 7. We do not promise a count; our estimate is 6 to 12 a month.
• In an outage, a person responds within 1 hour and service is restored within 4 hours; serious bugs get a response within 4 hours. Neither takes the lane.
• A restore test and a call every month, plus a one-page quarterly roadmap.
• Minimum term 3 months, or a 1-2 month sprint paid upfront.

Priorytet, €3,990 a month. Two changes in progress at once. Small, medium and large in 1, 2 and 5 days. We sell it only with a named stand-in engineer. Minimum term 6 months.

When we miss, the invoice drops. A missed outage deadline takes 10% off the month's fee. In Tor, a month with late changes takes another 10%, and missed deadlines on serious bugs 5%. The cap is 25% for Opieka and 30% for Tor. If the cap is reached in 2 of 3 consecutive months, you can leave with immediate effect. The credit is a signal, not insurance for your losses; the right to leave is your protection. For our first clients, the first two months are a measurement period: credits are calculated and reported but not deducted, and you can leave on 14 days' notice.

What you pay separately: hosting and AI usage, on your own accounts, with a spending cap written into the order. Nothing beyond the monthly fee is done or invoiced unless you accept a quote first.

What you own: the repositories, the domains and the cloud accounts, under your company. If you leave, H2M hands over access and documentation within 10 business days and answers your next engineer's questions for up to 4 hours. Reusable H2M components, such as the modules, stay with H2M, and you get a perpetual licence to them.

For a US team, the response window is 3:00-11:00 New York time. As of September 2026, H2M runs one Tor client at a time until a second engineer joins.

09

How to decide in one afternoon

In short: (1) pull 12 months of invoices and the renewal date; (2) project 36 months with an increase at each renewal; (3) run the €30,000 test; (4) list the manual work beside the tool; (5) check what you can export; (6) draw the three lines and find where they cross.

If the lines cross before month 24, or the list in step 4 is long, the audit is worth it. It costs a fixed 5,000 PLN (about €1,140), paid upfront and deducted from the build. In 5 business days you get the 3-year calculation: today's subscription and manual work against build, infrastructure and plan; when it pays back; what to move first; the risks; and a fixed build price. If the math does not work, we say so and do not build. The document stays with you.

10

Sources

1. Vertice, "SaaS inflation rate" (last updated July 2026). https://www.vertice.one/insights/saas-inflation-rate, accessed 25 September 2026.
2. Vertice, "SaaS Inflation Index 2026 Report". https://www.vertice.one/l/saas-inflation-index-report, accessed 25 September 2026.
3. Salesforce, "Salesforce Announces Pricing Update" (17 June 2025). https://www.salesforce.com/news/stories/pricing-update-2025/, accessed 25 September 2026.
4. Retool, "2026 Build vs. Buy Report" press release, BusinessWire (17 February 2026). https://www.financialcontent.com/article/bizwire-2026-2-17-retools-2026-build-vs-buy-report-reveals-35-of-enterprises-have-already-replaced-saas-with-custom-software, accessed 25 September 2026.
5. HubSpot, Sales Hub pricing. https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/sales, accessed 25 September 2026.
6. Base.com, pricing for Poland. https://base.com/pl-PL/cennik/, accessed 25 September 2026.
7. Base.com, pricing for Germany. https://base.com/de-DE/preise/, accessed 25 September 2026.
8. Base.com, pricing for the United States. https://base.com/en-US/pricing/, accessed 25 September 2026.
9. Cloudflare, Workers pricing. https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/, accessed 25 September 2026.
10. ITPro, "'How is he doing this?' - Marc Benioff questions Klarna CEO's move to scrap Workday, Salesforce" (13 September 2024). https://www.itpro.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/how-is-he-doing-this-marc-benioff-questions-klarna-ceo-s-scrapping-of-workday-salesforce-in-saas-consolidation-drive, accessed 25 September 2026.
11. CX Today, "Klarna Didn't Replace Salesforce, It Replaced Them with Alternative SaaS Apps" (11 December 2024). https://www.cxtoday.com/crm/klarna-didnt-replace-salesforce-it-replaced-them-with-alternative-saas-apps/, accessed 25 September 2026.
12. Diginomica, "Those shutting down Salesforce and Workday rumors from Klarna... no, we didn't replace SaaS with an LLM, admits CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski" (7 March 2025). https://diginomica.com/those-shutting-down-salesforce-and-workday-rumors-klarna-no-we-didnt-replace-saas-llm-admits-ceo, accessed 25 September 2026.
13. Narodowy Bank Polski, EUR mid rate, table 187/A/NBP/2026 (25 September 2026): 4.3750 PLN. https://api.nbp.pl/api/exchangerates/rates/a/eur/2026-09-25/, accessed 25 September 2026.

11

How this was written

The e-commerce and publisher cases come from H2M's own 2026 client projects: an API audit of the hub account and our scoping documents, anonymised and rounded so the clients cannot be identified. The Adcare figures are the ones already published on its case page. The 36-month model is plain arithmetic on the assumptions stated above each chart. The text was drafted with AI assistance, then edited and fact-checked against the sources listed; market prices are as of 25 September 2026 and H2M prices follow its SLA dated the same day.