SaaS Replacement Services on Google Cloud
What the AI era means for your stack, and your budget
The economics of custom development have changed. Platforms costing EUR 100–500k a year in licence fees are increasingly worth rebuilding as something you own, running on infrastructure you already pay for, with a roadmap set by your business rather than a vendor's.
Start with an assessmentRead our approach
- 20+ years on Google Cloud
- Google Cloud Premier Partner
- 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 asset
A SaaS renewal is an operating expense that leaves nothing behind, while a purpose-built platform sits on the balance sheet, integrates natively with the data warehouse you already run, and 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
No platform allegiances
We build on Google Cloud because that is where twenty years of our engineering experience sits: BigQuery, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, dbt. What we do not have is a reseller relationship that makes one answer more profitable than another, which matters on a page whose whole argument is about vendor lock-in.
Sometimes the assessment concludes that a tool is worth keeping. That is a legitimate outcome, and it is cheaper to reach it in three weeks than eighteen months in.
20+
Years building on Google Cloud, since before most of it had a name
50+
Google Cloud certifications across the team
Premier
Google Cloud Premier Partner, with specialisations in data and infrastructure
Where the business case lands first
Four categories where the arithmetic tends to work out earliest. The assessment produces a TCO model per tool rather than a general argument, because whether a replacement makes sense depends on your volumes and your renewal dates.
Replacing a licensed BI tool with a metric layer built natively on BigQuery, dbt and the data infrastructure you already run.
Structurally cheaper
Reporting that runs on the warehouse you are already paying for, rather than a per-seat licence on top of it.
A semantic layer you own
Metric definitions become a versioned asset in your repository instead of configuration inside somebody else's product.
No seat maths
Giving one more person access stops being a budget decision, which changes how widely reporting actually gets used.
CDP logic integrated directly with the warehouse: identity resolution and reverse ETL built on BigQuery, which covers around 80% of the use cases at materially lower cost.
Warehouse-native
Profiles assembled where the data already is, rather than copied out to a third party and synced back.
Full data residency
Customer data stays in your own environment, which shortens most conversations with legal considerably.
Identity & reverse ETL
The two pieces that actually make a CDP useful, built on infrastructure you control.
A custom integration layer on Cloud Run, which tends to become structurally cheaper somewhere around twenty connectors and is easier to maintain from that point on.
Cost that follows usage
Serverless pricing rather than an enterprise tier sized for a volume you may never reach.
Full control of behaviour
Retry logic, error handling and transformations written the way your systems actually need them.
Maintainable by your team
Ordinary code in your repository, which your engineers can read without a vendor certification.
iPaaS
Enterprise iPaaS pricing is difficult to justify for stable, low-volume flows. A lightweight integration layer removes both the overhead and the annual renewal conversation.
Right-sized
Built for the flows you actually run rather than for the platform's full feature matrix.
No renewal anxiety
Nothing expires, so the integration layer stops being an annual negotiation.
Lower overhead
Less configuration surface, fewer specialists needed, and no platform upgrade cycle to plan around.
Three phases, and all three matter
A replacement only holds if the business case, the build and the operating model are all dealt with. We stay involved from the decision through to the point where your own team is running it, rather than handing over at go-live.
3–4 weeks
Assessment
01
One architect and one account lead produce a detailed TCO model per tool, a technical scorecard and a prioritised migration roadmap. The output is a go or no-go per tool, with the cost model behind it.
3–9 months
Co-build
02
Three to six of our engineers working alongside one or two of yours, with every architectural decision documented together. Your team ends up understanding the platform because they helped build it.
12–24 months
Managed & handover
03
A small team from us operates the platform while internal capability builds in parallel, against handover criteria agreed at the start rather than negotiated at the end.
Before you renew anything
Is this not just rebuilding something that already works?
Sometimes, and where that is the case the assessment says so. 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 happens to our team's workload during a build?
One or two of your engineers work alongside ours, which is a real commitment and worth planning for. It is also the mechanism by which the platform ends up understood internally rather than being a new black box with a different logo on it.
What if the assessment says we should keep the tool?
Then that is the answer, and it is a considerably cheaper answer to get in three weeks than eighteen months into a migration. A go or no-go per tool is the expected output rather than a disappointing one.
How do you time this against our renewal dates?
Renewal windows usually set the schedule, since the saving only starts when the contract ends. The roadmap that comes out of the assessment is sequenced around them rather than around what is technically most convenient.
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
Want a TCO model for the tools you are renewing?
The assessment runs three to four weeks and produces a go or no-go per tool with the cost model behind it. Worth starting before the renewal conversation rather than during it.