The SaaS that won't let you grow

In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote in The Wall Street Journal that “software is eating the world”. He was right, and software as a service was one of the main reasons. Today a company can have a CRM, a help desk and an expense system running in weeks, with no servers and no two-year projects. To get started, it's very hard to beat.

But the phrase has a second, less quoted reading. When the software belongs to someone else, it doesn't just eat the world: it also eats your way of working.

The average company's logic

A SaaS product is designed to serve many companies. It often offers configurable stages, fields and approval rules, within limits that vary by product and contract. Sometimes that configuration works for years. Trouble starts when an important process needs exceptions, integrations or changes the tool cannot support at a reasonable cost.

The moment is recognizable. A sales team discovers that its real sales cycle, with tenders, technical visits and credit approvals, doesn't fit the CRM's five stages. Then come the side spreadsheets, the fields repurposed for something else and the phrase repeated in every improvement meeting: “the system doesn't allow it”.

When the tool decides how your team works, you're no longer using software. You're following someone else's process.

The costs that aren't in the quote

The monthly subscription is transparent. What isn't in the quote is what happens around it. You pay for whole modules and use them halfway, because the rest doesn't fit your operations. Your data lives in the vendor's format, and getting it out costs time or money. Above all, your operations roadmap starts to depend on someone else's roadmap: if the vendor doesn't prioritize what you need, you wait.

Without swinging to the other extreme

None of this is an argument for throwing out all software as a service, or for building everything from scratch, which is another way of getting it wrong. Many SaaS products do their job very well and should stay. The useful question is, tool by tool: does it deliver the value the business needs, or does it force you to work its way?

What delivers gets connected. What creates friction gets assessed with data and, when it makes sense, replaced by a module built on your own rules. The underlying difference is ownership: with a SaaS you rent someone else's way of working. With your logic in a system that's yours, operations can evolve at the pace of the business rather than the vendor's.

The scenes in these episodes are composites of common situations, not customer cases. Any figures in them are illustrative.