I have been sick to death of everything I need to do my job adding another SaaS subscription to our veritable Mt Everest of them for quite a while now.
We all live and breathe this frustration daily. Every tool that does almost what you need, so you pay for it. Then it doesn’t quite reach the next bit, so you pay for a second. The second won’t talk to the first, so now you’re paying for a third whose entire job is standing between the other two going “you should really meet.” And somewhere in all of that, you end up spending half your week copy-pasting between the lot of them, because it just needs to get done and you are the faster stop gap. There’s an underlying cost here though, and it’s more than just the mounting subscription fees. If you’re like me, it’s your sanity.
Each one was only $40. That’s the whole con of it. You just suck it up as unavoidable. You’d interrogate a single $500 line on the P&L within an inch of its life, but twelve little $40s, scattered across three cards and two people’s expense claims? They never have to justify themselves, because “Well, it’s just $40 so we can live with it.”
Add them up sometime. Properly. All of them, including the two you forgot you were paying for (there are always two). Then add the hours your people lose holding it together with what I lovingly call duct tape and good intentions. It’s probably a pretty ugly not so little number you have sitting there huh?
So I finally said “f*ck this” and built our own CRM, in my own time. Every tool we tried needed a workaround, then the workaround needed a workaround, and at some point I added up how much of my week was going on just keeping the things fed and talking to each other. It was grim. I was basically working full time for software I was paying for the privilege of not even owning.
The subscription isn’t even the cheap part when you start adding them all up, and yet the most expensive part is everything you do to make the cheap parts do what you needed in the first place. Seriously, when is the last time you signed up for a product and it actually did all of the things you wanted (desperately needed) it to do? For me, it is never, and I am officially done with it. So I broke up with it. Sorry, not sorry SaaS models everywhere.
None of this means all SaaS is evil or you need to torch the lot by Friday. Some of those tools genuinely earn their keep in ways that can’t just get built custom in a couple of weeks of staying up all night coding and binging Supernatural in the background. But a good chunk of them are just there,charging you for the privilege of not quite fitting, and you’ve stopped clocking it because, well, $40.
So go and clock it. Find the tools everyone in your business work around. Ask what it would look like if it just worked the way you do. Then ask why you’re still paying for three of them that aren’t really working for you like they should.
Then come rant at me and feel better when I tell you we can make it stop!