Custom software development to replace your SaaS tools
What AI changes for your stack and your budget
AI has made custom software development faster and cheaper. Platforms that cost EUR 100k to 500k a year in licences are now worth rebuilding as software you own. It runs on infrastructure you already pay for. The roadmap follows your business, not a vendor.
Book your free 30-minute callRead our approach
- 20+ years building data platforms
- 50+ certifications
- ISO 27001:2022
Why the renewal keeps getting signed
Buying enterprise software made obvious sense when building was expensive and slow. That calculation has moved, but renewals tend to be approved on the reasoning that applied when the contract was first signed.
The licence is an operating expense nobody questions
It renews on a cycle, the amount is familiar, and challenging it means someone has to own the alternative. So the number goes up a little each year and stays in the budget.
You are paying for a platform you use a fraction of
Enterprise pricing assumes a breadth of use that most organisations never reach. The stable, low-volume flows that actually run are the expensive part of an unjustifiable contract.
The roadmap belongs to someone else
The feature you need arrives when the vendor's other customers want it too, and the integration you rely on changes when it suits them. Neither is unreasonable; both are outside your control.
From subscription to custom software you own
A SaaS renewal is an operating expense that leaves nothing behind. Custom software is an asset. It works with the data warehouse you already run. It changes when your roadmap says so.
Before
- Recurring licence cost with nothing owned at the end
- Unpredictable bills tied to seats and volume tiers
- Data living in a vendor's environment
- A black box your team cannot extend
- Feature timing set by the vendor's other customers
After
- A platform, its data and its integrations owned outright
- Predictable engineering cost in place of licence bills
- Full data residency inside your own environment
- Systems your own engineers understand and extend
- A roadmap that follows your priorities
Custom software we build
Examples of what we build, often as a replacement for a SaaS tool. Each one runs in your own cloud environment and is yours once it is built.
Your own reporting app on your data warehouse: dashboards, KPI and management reports that everyone who needs them can open, with metric definitions your team owns.
Website, campaigns, contact database and lead management in one platform your marketing team can change itself. We built this for our own marketing first.
Email & social
Newsletters, email signatures and social scheduling in the same platform, managed from one place.
Writing & content
A writing assistant that checks grammar and tone against your house style and terminology, for everyone on the team.
Diagrams & whiteboards
A diagram and whiteboard tool where several people work at once, with a presentation mode for workshops and meetings.
Service desk
A service desk where AI agents triage, recommend, resolve and escalate tickets, with your SLAs measured in real time.
One customer profile in your own data warehouse, with identity resolution and reverse ETL that sends audiences back to your marketing tools.
An integration layer that connects your systems, with retries, error handling and transformations written the way your systems need them, in ordinary code your team can maintain.
How a custom software development project runs
We stay involved from the first conversation until your own team runs the software.
Plan
01
It starts with a free 30-minute call. An architect and an account lead then look at the tools you want to replace and write a plan with the architecture and a cost estimate. We also advise on what is possible: which features to add and how it can look.
Build
02
Our engineers handle the custom application development together with your team, using AI-assisted development. The team is sized to the work. We work in sprints, so you see working software early and steer the design as it grows.
Run and hand over
03
We run the platform while your team builds up its own knowledge. The handover criteria are agreed at the start.
Custom software we already build and run
We build our own tools the same way we build them for clients: a marketing platform, a sales app, a writing assistant, an email signature tool, a diagram and whiteboard tool and a service desk. For clients that ranges from reporting apps to customer data platforms.
De Mandemakers Groep · BI and reporting
From Looker to a BI platform built with AI
De Mandemakers Groep ran its reporting on Looker, with licence costs that kept rising and user restrictions that limited who could open a report. Instead of renewing, DMG built its own reporting application with us on BigQuery, using AI-assisted development, and the existing reports moved over in about a month, each one validated against the original data. The licence cost is gone, anyone who needs a report can use one, and DMG's own team now builds new reports itself.
Read the case study →
Crystalloids · our own marketing stack
Moving our own website off HubSpot
Our website, email, campaigns, contact database and social scheduling all sat under one SaaS licence. We rebuilt the website in our own cloud environment with AI-assisted development, and it became the first piece of a programme replacing the whole stack one tool at a time. The marketing team changes the design itself now, the site is faster on mobile, and where the stack used to cost a five-figure sum a year, it is a small fraction of that today, most of it cloud infrastructure and AI usage.
Read the case study →
Questions about custom software development
Is this not just rebuilding something that already works?
Sometimes, and where that is the case we tell you. The argument for replacing is strongest where licence cost is high relative to the fraction of the product you use, where the data really needs to live in your environment, or where the vendor roadmap is blocking something the business needs.
What does custom software development cost?
It depends on what you replace and how much you build. For a BI tool, that means how many reports you have and how much is already built. We work in sprints and our developers work per hour, so the budget follows the size of the team.
How is custom software different from a SaaS alternative?
A SaaS alternative is another vendor with another licence. Custom software, or bespoke software, is yours. You decide which features it has and how it looks. You pay for the cloud it runs on, not per user or per contact.
How does AI change custom software development?
AI writes a large part of the code, so building takes less time and costs less. The work that remains is the architecture, the design choices and testing against your data. That is where we help.
How do you time this against our renewal dates?
Start before the renewal conversation. Then you have the plan and the cost estimate in hand when the contract comes up.
Who runs it once it is built?
We do, for a period, while your team builds up to taking it on, with explicit handover criteria set at the start. We are ISO 27001:2022 certified, and for regulated clients we work to whatever additional framework applies.
Next step
What would custom software development cost you?
In a free 30-minute call we look at the tools you pay for, what you would want to build instead, and what that roughly involves. It is worth having before your next renewal comes up.