SaaS was a workaround for expensive software

For twenty years, the only affordable way to get software was to share one generic product with ten thousand other companies and pay for it forever. We called it SaaS and treated it as the natural order of things.

It wasn’t. It was a workaround for a constraint: building software was expensive, so you couldn’t have your own. Renting a one-size-fits-all version was the compromise everyone accepted.

The constraint is gone. With AI as the execution layer, building the exact system a business needs is no longer slow or expensive. And the moment building gets cheap, the compromise stops making sense.

Which exposes what SaaS actually costs you: software built for the average of everyone, that you’ll use 3% of, that you’ll pay for forever, that holds your data hostage, and that you can’t change when your business does.

The alternative isn’t “a cheaper SaaS.” It’s owning the 100% you actually need — custom software, shipped in weeks, transferred to you in full, running on infrastructure you control.

SaaS isn’t dead. But it’s no longer the default. Owning beats renting the moment owning gets cheap — and for software, it just did.