Off-the-Shelf Doesn’t Fit. This is Software Democracy.
Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before… It’s the next “app to end all apps”, the next finance system that will handle your project invoicing woes, the team sharing tool that will mean no-one misses those last-minute client requests, or the CRM giant that offers infinite customisations and integrations to cater for your every process. All for the very reasonable monthly fee of £ with an initial “mobilisation” phase of £££.
Except it isn’t. The proof was clear - after spending all that money implementing what they said would be a “game-changer and business accelerator” you were left with overly complex workflows and outdated integrations that would now incur additional subscription fees to fix.
Or, maybe something that was meant to be “built around your unique way of working” ended up being anything but, a monolithic beast of irrelevant functionality and as the project deadline approached, those Must-haves became Nice-to-haves and ultimately were never implemented. But you’ve got it now, you spent the money, so what do you do? bludgeon the team over the head with it until they figure out a hack to get the square-peg / round-hole to work? accept defeat and acknowledge that the spreadsheet “Bill” keeps offline is actually doing a better job than the intended system?
It’s always been a tricky line to walk for SaaS companies: the path to success is mass-adoption, but mass-adoption requires mass-appeal. That’s easy to sketch on a whiteboard if you’re, say, a cloud storage provider - offer a clean repository, basic sync tools, and a few headline integrations, and you’ve got something most businesses can use. But when the software needs to handle real complexity - like project workflows, involving chains, or CRM logic - that same broad-stokes approach starts to fall apart. The more a tool tries to cater to everyone, the more likely it is to truly satisfy no one.
But for those SaaS companies that fall outside that bracket it’s a case of making features users request to either A: keep your existing users or B: win new users over by providing the extra functionality. All of that while trying to maintain the confidence in the original functionality of the product that brought it to market in the first place.
This inevitably leads to the problem of functionality built into the software becoming less relevant the bigger it grows. One way of addressing this is to “flavour” subscriptions, where you can pay for “Set A” or “Set B” functionality, rather than paying for - or being exposed to - the whole offering, but even when you get to this bespoke “flavour”, it’s very likely you are still looking at a system that you don’t fully utilise, and for all the functionality it does provide, I’ll bet there’s still manual processes that “don’t fit to the way this works” or “can’t yet be integrated”.
Implemented a finance system that takes some headaches away from the invoicing, but still leaves the team having to chase aged debtors or reconcile supplier statements? Or maybe a new project management portal that can automatically email the team with actions from the last meeting, but can’t coordinate their calendars to set the next meeting in a free slot for all?
This may all sound like a big ol’ dig at the SaaS giants, but it’s not... well, not entirely. The thing is, businesses - like people - are unique. They are a mix of teams, objectives, disciplines and industries that mean even within a niche, it’s likely your business works differently to your competitors. And that’s why implementing something like Salesforce, or Sage, or ServiceNow all come with a long lead time, a learning period and their fair share of bumps along the way. They are built for the many - but you must jump through their hoops like everyone else to make use of the product.
Well, it’s 2025. And this period of bending to the giants is on the way out. Why pay 100% for something you only use 10% of? In fact why pay a monthly subscription at all? You can do this yourself, no matter your business size. You can build it yourself and take ownership. Agentic AI has reached the point where “vibe coding” isn’t the risky proposition many doomsdayers would have it be. You can describe in minute detail exactly what you need a tool to do, along with all the idiosyncrasies that exist within your personal business process and have this built into a tool to automate it. Not in a way that means you have to learn an entirely new ecosystem, but by getting what you want in a way that makes sense to you.
There exist now the tools you can use to do this yourself; Claude Code, Cursor, Roo Code, or OpenAI’s Codex and with a little guidance if needed you can be creating your own internal applications to solve those things for your teams where everyone has a seat at the table, and functionality can be explained in plain English, then build at a rapid pace and be demoed daily until you get to the desired outcome.
It's not something to go in without first understanding how you should build things and refreshing your product management knowledge will certainly help avoid a few pitfalls, but overall there is such an opportunity for innovation within businesses and teams that can build and own the knowledge of the systems that run their businesses, rather than submitting to the next price hike and per-head licensing scheme the traditional SaaS offerings roll out.
Why not own the software you run? What is more personal than your business practices, and what could be more powerful than having the full control for new features and building new applications when the need arises? No more waiting for the implementation team for product X to have a window to install, missing the boat when your need is now, no more surprise licensed extras, no more confusion. Your thing, your way.
It is the time of software democracy, the future is bright and will belong to those who stopped waiting for feature releases and started building their own.
