>By Edora Tech Engineering
||5 MIN READ
Your SaaS stack just got more expensive. Again.
Maybe it arrived as an email from Atlassian announcing a 10% “infrastructure investment” increase. Maybe it was a HubSpot renewal quote with an unfamiliar line item for “AI Credits.” Whatever the trigger, the conversation in your next leadership meeting will be the same: how do we get this under control?
The honest answer is uncomfortable. You probably cannot negotiate your way out of it. These are structural, industry-wide price movements — and they are accelerating.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
PricePulse’s State of SaaS Pricing H1 2026 report tracked more than 90 tools and found that 67 of them raised prices in the first six months of 2026 alone. The compound effect: a standard SaaS stack for a 50-person company that cost approximately $84,000 per year in 2024 now costs over $112,000 — a 34% increase in two years, while general CPI inflation sat at around 3.2% over the same period.
Zylo’s 2026 SaaS Pricing Trends analysis puts a second data point on the same trend: software licensing expenses are rising 15.1% year-over-year, driven not by new tools being added, but by existing vendors charging more for what you already have.
The category-level numbers from PricePulse are worth sitting with:
| Category | H1 2026 Price Change |
|---|---|
| AI / LLM Tools | +78% |
| CRM | +52% |
| Marketing Automation | +44% |
| Project Management | +38% |
| Dev Tools | +35% |
| Design Tools | +29% |
If your business runs on a CRM, a project tracker, and a marketing platform, you are looking at an average cost increase somewhere between 38% and 52% — for the same software you were using two years ago.
Why Negotiating Does Not Scale
The instinct is to call your account rep and push back. Sometimes that works, once. But the structural problem remains.
Per-seat pricing was designed to make software look affordable at the point of sale and grow more expensive as you do. Every new hire is a new licence. Every team expansion is a new bill. The vendor’s revenue grows automatically with your headcount — whether or not their product is delivering proportionally more value.
The vendor also holds most of the leverage. Switching costs — migrating data, retraining staff, rebuilding integrations — are high enough that most businesses absorb the increase. That is not a design flaw from the vendor’s perspective. It is the model.
The PricePulse report also found that the average notice period before a price increase takes effect has shrunk to just 41 days (down from 67 days in 2024). By the time you see the email, you have six weeks to act before the new rate applies to your renewal.
The Break-Even Case for Custom Software
Here is where the conversation usually gets more interesting.
A custom web application has a known, fixed development cost. Once built, it belongs to your business. Infrastructure costs on modern serverless platforms (AWS Lambda, Cloudflare Workers, Google Cloud Run) are pay-for-what-you-use — they do not scale with headcount. Adding your 20th user costs you no more in licensing than your first.
Consider a project management replacement for a 25-person team. At a conservative $15 per seat per month on a mid-tier SaaS tool:
- Year 1 SaaS cost: $4,500
- Year 2 SaaS cost: $4,500 (before any price increases)
- Year 3 SaaS cost: If the tool follows H1 2026 averages, closer to $6,200
A focused custom project management tool built for your specific workflows — without the feature bloat, without the mandatory AI tier — might cost $5,000–$8,000 to build once. The infrastructure overhead after that is typically $20–$50 per month. By the end of year two, the numbers are either at break-even or past it. By year three or four, the savings are compounding in your favour.
And that calculation does not factor in the hours your team loses context-switching between tools, duplicating data across systems, or configuring features they will never use.
Not Every SaaS Tool Should Be Replaced
This is not an argument for building everything from scratch. That would be a different kind of expensive mistake.
Buy commodity functions. Email infrastructure, payroll, accounting, cloud storage — these tools are mature, heavily regulated, and genuinely risky to rebuild. The ongoing vendor investment in compliance and security is real, and you benefit from it.
Build differentiating workflows. The right trigger to consider a custom build is when a specific internal process is the engine of how your business operates, and no off-the-shelf tool fits it without significant workarounds. Common signals:
- Your team uses two or three SaaS tools together to complete a single workflow
- You are paying for features you have never used and cannot remove from the plan
- Your per-seat cost is rising faster than your team’s headcount
- You cannot easily export your own data
What a Practical Approach Looks Like
When we work with a business considering this trade-off, the conversation usually starts with a single question: what does this tool actually do for your team every day?
Most SaaS platforms are built for the broadest possible market. A CRM designed for 10,000-seat enterprise sales teams carries assumptions — fields, pipelines, permission structures — that a 20-person consultancy will never need. A custom CRM built specifically for that consultancy’s client management process might have a tenth of the features and cost a fraction of the annual licence fee to operate.
The goal is not to be clever about software. It is to stop paying a growth tax on tools you have already outgrown.
Curious whether a specific tool in your stack makes sense to replace?
We do straightforward build-vs-buy assessments — no pitch deck, no pressure. Just a clear answer. If the numbers favour staying on SaaS, we will tell you that too.