Your SaaS Strategy Is a Slow-Motion Surrender

Let me be blunt: if your organisation's technology strategy is "buy SaaS, outsource risk, avoid building," you are actively engineering your own decline.

Not slowly. Not eventually. Now.

While you're sitting in procurement meetings debating vendor shortlists, your competitors are building. While you're waiting for your SaaS provider's roadmap to maybe include that feature you desperately need, someone smaller and hungrier is shipping it this week. While you're paying per-seat licensing fees that grow every year, they're investing that money in capability that compounds.

The Outsourcing Risk Fallacy

Here's the logic I hear constantly from enterprise leaders:

"We buy SaaS because we want to outsource risk. We don't want to maintain systems. We don't want to worry about security. We don't want the headache of building and supporting software."

This sounds reasonable. It isn't.

What you're actually saying is: "We don't want to develop the capability to solve our own problems."

And what you're actually doing is: "We're paying someone else to own our competitive advantage."

Think about that. The systems that run your business, that shape your customer experience, that differentiate you from competitors, you've handed control of those to vendors whose primary obligation is to their shareholders, not to your success.

Your "outsourced risk" is actually outsourced capability. And capability is the only thing that matters.

Your Vendor Doesn't Care About Your Success

I need you to understand something that should be obvious but somehow isn't:

A vendor succeeds when you keep paying. That's it. Whether their software actually helps you win in your market, whether it enables your team to do better work, whether it differentiates you from competitors, none of that matters to their business model.

In fact, the ideal customer for most SaaS companies is one who:

• •Pays reliably
• •Never contacts support
• •Doesn't request features
• •Doesn't use most of the product
• •Renews automatically

Does that sound like a partner invested in your success? Or does it sound like a landlord who hopes you never call about the leaky tap?

You are renting generic software and calling it a strategy.

The Capability Gap Is Widening

Here's what's happening while you're locked into renewal cycles:

The capability required to build software has collapsed. What took teams of engineers and months of work five years ago can now be done by a small group with AI tools in weeks. Sometimes days.

This means the barrier between "organisations that build" and "organisations that buy" is disappearing. And the organisations that build are developing advantages that compound:

Meanwhile, organisations addicted to SaaS are:

• ✗Paying more every year for the same capabilities
• ✗Waiting for vendors to solve their problems
• ✗Training their teams to be software consumers, not builders
• ✗Watching their differentiation erode as competitors access the same tools

The gap between these two types of organisations is widening every month. And if you're on the wrong side, you're not standing still, you're falling behind.

"But We're Not a Technology Company"

I hear this constantly. Universities say it. Government agencies say it. Professional services firms say it. Retailers say it.

"We're not a technology company. We shouldn't be building software."

This is cope. Dangerous cope.

Every organisation is a technology company now. The systems you use determine how you operate, how you serve customers, how you compete. Pretending otherwise doesn't make it false, it just means you're the last to realise it.

When a university says "we're not a technology company," they're ignoring that their student experience is entirely mediated by software. Their ability to attract students, support learning, and demonstrate outcomes depends on systems they've outsourced to vendors who serve hundreds of other universities identically.

When a professional services firm says "we're not a technology company," they're ignoring that their competitors are using AI to deliver services faster and cheaper. The firms that figure out how to augment their expertise with custom-built tools will eat the ones still relying on generic software.

The Real Risk Calculation

Let's talk about risk properly, because the current calculus is backwards.

The first list is about things that might go wrong with a specific project. The second list is about your organisation's long-term survival.

You're avoiding small, manageable risks by taking on existential ones. That's not prudent. It's cowardly.

What Your Competition Is Doing

While you're evaluating vendors, here's what the organisations that will outcompete you are doing:

• →
  They're building small, focused tools that solve specific problems. Not trying to replace every system at once. Just identifying friction, building solutions, and shipping.
• →
  They're developing internal capability. Training their people to work with AI, to think in systems, to build rather than just consume.
• →
  They're spending SaaS budget on people instead of licenses. That $500K annual software spend? It could fund a small team that builds exactly what you need.
• →
  They're moving fast. While you're in month four of a vendor evaluation, they've already shipped three internal tools.
• →
  They're creating assets, not expenses. Every dollar they spend on building creates something they own.

You might think you're competing against organisations of similar size and resources. You're not. You're competing against anyone who's figured out that building capability is more valuable than renting software.

And that includes much smaller players who will run circles around you.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Your IT Department

If your IT team's job is primarily to manage vendors, evaluate software, and implement other people's products, you don't have a technology organisation. You have a procurement department that happens to deal with software.

Real technology capability means being able to look at a problem and build a solution. It means having people who understand your business deeply enough to create tools that fit your specific needs. It means developing institutional knowledge about what works, what doesn't, and how to improve.

Vendor management is not capability. It's administration.

I'm not saying fire your IT team. I'm saying redirect them. Stop evaluating the fifteenth CRM option and start building the specific customer tools your business actually needs. Stop managing vendor relationships and start developing internal skills. Stop implementing other people's software and start creating your own.

The talent exists. The tools exist. The only thing missing is the courage to stop outsourcing and start building.

"But We Did Try Building Once and It Failed"

Good. That means you learned something.

Failure is not an argument against building. It's a necessary step in developing capability. Every organisation that's good at building software has a graveyard of failed projects behind them.

The question isn't whether you've failed. It's whether you learned from the failure and tried again, or whether you used it as an excuse to retreat into vendor dependency forever.

Your competitors failed too. They just didn't stop.

The Vendor Lock-In You Don't See

Everyone worries about technical lock-in. Proprietary formats, integration dependencies, migration costs. These are real concerns.

But the more dangerous lock-in is capability lock-in.

Every year you spend buying instead of building, your organisation loses muscle. The people who might have developed building skills don't. The institutional knowledge of how to create solutions atrophies. The confidence to tackle problems internally evaporates.

After enough years of this, you couldn't build even if you wanted to. You've become completely dependent on vendors to solve your problems. You've lost the capability to help yourself.

This is the real lock-in. And unlike technical lock-in, you can't migrate your way out of it. You have to rebuild from scratch, if you even still have people who remember how.

What This Means for You

If you're a leader in an organisation that has outsourced its capability to SaaS vendors, you have a choice to make.

The first option is easier in the short term. The second is the only one that doesn't end in irrelevance.

The Window Is Closing

AI has changed the economics of building. The capability gap between large organisations and small teams has collapsed. The advantages you thought you had from scale and resources are eroding.

This is either an opportunity or a threat, depending on what you do next.

If you start building capability now, you can catch up. The tools are accessible. The skills are learnable. The investment is manageable.

If you wait, if you stick with the vendor strategy because it's comfortable, because it's what you know, because it feels less risky, you will find yourself unable to compete with organisations that didn't wait.

The choice is yours. But it's not a choice you can defer forever.