SaaS replacement
Kill your SaaS bill. Not all of it — just the part you’ve outgrown.
Buy vs. build just flipped. The tools you're renting can be software you own — built in weeks, paid back inside a year, and shaped to how you actually work.
- Typical payback period
- 11 monthson build #1
- Avg. delivery time
- 6 weeksper tool
- First engagement
- Post-paidpay when it works
- Code & IP ownership
- 100%on payment
The flip
Why buying stopped making sense
Three-year total cost for one mid-sized business replacing four SaaS tools. One measure, two options. Illustrative figures — run your own in the Teardown.
- Keep renting (4 SaaS tools)
- $662,400
- Build once with QADtech Lab
- $148,000
Compounds with seats and annual price rises. Nothing owned at the end.
One build, plus hosting and support. You hold the code and the IP.
At a typical $18,406/mo stack, $163K a year of it is addressable. Renting that for three more years at 8% a year is $530,611.
What owning it would cost depends on which tools — so there is no second bar for you yet. Name them in the Teardown →
The gap is the whole argument. It is also why we tell you which tools to leave alone — that gap only holds for the subscriptions you have genuinely outgrown.
The stack
Rent software, rent servers, rent intelligence — or own all three.
Same argument, three layers. Each one is a bigger line on your P&L than the one above it.
Layer 1 · software
Your apps
Renting: SaaS subscriptions — per seat, per month, forever, rising annually.
Owning: Custom apps you hold the repo for.
Layer 2 · infrastructure
Your servers
Renting: Metered compute, storage, and egress fees for reading your own data.
Owning: Hardware in a colo, or your own rack.
Layer 3 · intelligence
Your models
Renting: Per-token API calls, with your data leaving your perimeter.
Owning: Open-weights models on your own GPUs.
We sell the software layer outright. On infrastructure we sell the assessment — what can move, what it would save, and whether to do it at all — because we have not yet delivered an on-prem migration ourselves. We would rather say that than find out you checked.
How it works
Land small. Expand on proof.
Nobody signs off on re-platforming the company. Plenty of people sign off on replacing the one tool that costs $52,000 and gets used 15%.
The Teardown
Pick the tools you pay for, correct our price estimates, and get a ranked plan. Four minutes, no email, computed in your browser.
~4 minutesno gateThe First Win
We build the smallest useful thing from your plan in two weeks. You use it. If it does what we said, you pay — and if it does not, you owe us nothing.
$12,000
10 working daysnothing upfrontWhere a typical stack usually starts
First Replacement
Tool Replacement. One tool, replaced properly, with the migration and integrations that make it usable on day one.
from $36,000
6–8 weeksfixed priceRolling replacement
Next tool, then the next. Each quoted separately with its own payback, so you can stop the moment the maths stops working.
quoted per tool
one at a timestop anytimeOwn & Operate
We run what we built — hosting, patching, changes, on-call. Optional, cancellable, and the exit handover is included from the start.
from $2,400/mo
monthlycancel anytime
The first win
Pay when it works.
Not before.
We pick the smallest useful thing from your plan and build it in two weeks. You use it. If it does what we said it would, you pay. If it doesn’t, you owe us nothing and you keep the write-up.
- Time to delivery
- 10 working days
- Due upfront
- Nothing
- Invoice raised
- On acceptance
- Scope
- One workflow
Four weeks. One core workflow.
Four weeks buys the single thing your users do most — not a platform. We agree that one workflow in writing before we start, and it doesn’t change mid-build. If we miss the date, you stop paying. Week five onward is on us until it ships.
That remedy is free continued work until delivery — not refunds or damages. We cap it so we can actually honour it.
✓ Fits in ten working days
- One internal tool replacing a spreadsheet everyone hates
- A single workflow: intake → approval → notification
- One report that currently justifies a BI seat
- One integration that removes a manual copy-paste job
- The 15% of your CRM you actually use, as a standalone view
✕ Doesn’t fit — so we won’t promise it
- Anything needing accounts, roles, admin and billing
- Multi-tenant anything
- More than one integration
- Data migration with cleansing and reconciliation
- Anything gated on your security review completing first
- Mobile and web together — pick one
The keeps
Half of what we find, we tell you to keep.
A vendor who tells you not to buy from them is the only kind worth believing. Roughly half of a typical teardown comes back “leave it alone” — with the reason.
Slack
Network effects and integrations. Rebuilding chat is a classic own-goal.
Keep
Stripe
Payments, fraud, PCI scope. Never rebuild regulated infrastructure.
Keep
QuickBooks
Tax and statutory compliance changes yearly. The maintenance burden isn't worth it.
Keep
Google Workspace
Mail, calendar and identity for everyone. The definition of don't touch it.
Keep
At a typical $18,406/mo stack, we'd tell a business to leave 3 of its 6 departments alone — before it has named a single tool.
And where you can’t replace something — AWS, Snowflake — we won’t pretend otherwise. We’ll tell you how to stop overpaying for it instead, which is usually worth 20–30% with no rebuild at all.
Ask us what your infrastructure line looks like →This is also why we don’t claim to replace your whole stack. Naming the limit ourselves is what makes the rest of it credible.
The index
We published the whole methodology.
The scoring rubric and the four verdicts are public and versioned — read the numbers the engine actually uses. Competitors are welcome to them; that is rather the point.
The awkward questions
The questions you were going to ask anyway.
- Who owns the code?
- You do, in full, from the moment you pay. The repository transfers and the IP assigns outright — it is one clause in the agreement, not a promise on a webpage. During a two-week first win it runs on our infrastructure and you use the working app; on payment we hand over the repo and deploy into your cloud.
- What if you miss the date?
- You stop paying. Week five onward is on us until it ships. The remedy is free continued work until delivery — capped there deliberately, because a promise of damages we could not honour would be worth nothing.
- What if we want to leave?
- Own & Operate is monthly and cancellable, and the exit handover is written in from the start rather than negotiated when you are already unhappy. You hold the code either way, so leaving is a decision rather than an escape.
- Who maintains it afterwards?
- Either you or us. If you have engineers, the handover includes the runbooks so they can. If you would rather not, Own & Operate covers hosting, patching, monitoring and changes. We would rather you had the choice than the dependency.
- What if you go out of business?
- A fair question about a young firm, and the honest answer is: you keep working software you own outright, with the repository already in your hands and running in your own cloud. That is the point of assigning the IP on payment rather than at the end of a contract. You would need to find someone else to maintain it — but you would not lose it, and you would not be locked out of it. There is nothing in the build that only we can run.
Find out what you’d actually save.
Four minutes, no email, and the numbers are computed in your browser rather than sent anywhere. You’ll get a ranked plan — including what we’d tell you to keep.
Want us to check the numbers against your real invoices? That’s the verified teardown — five days, and contact details are only needed there.