Our SaaS bill is effectively zero. Here's why that's not an accident.
If you asked most businesses to tally up their monthly SaaS spend, the number would probably surprise them. Project management tools, CRM platforms, client portals, quoting software, scheduling tools, communication apps — it stacks up fast. Industry estimates put the average UK SME spend at well over £200 per user per month once you account for all the overlapping subscriptions across a team.
At Daybrain, we pay £32 per user. That covers everything.
That's not a rounding error or a startup-phase shortcut. It's the direct result of building bespoke software that replaces almost every recurring licence we'd otherwise be paying for. And it's the same approach we bring to every client we work with.
What we actually pay — and what we don't
Here's a straight breakdown of our software costs:
| Tool | Monthly Cost Per User |
|---|---|
| Google Workspace | £14 |
| Claude AI (Anthropic API) | £18 |
| Server hosting | £0 |
| Database | £0 |
| CRM | £0 |
| Client portal | £0 |
| Client-facing app | £0 |
| Project management | £0 |
| Quoting software | £0 |
| Total | ~£32 |
A comparable stack of off-the-shelf SaaS products — CRM, client portal, quoting platform, project management, a basic app — would conservatively cost £200 or more per user per month. Many businesses are paying significantly more once enterprise tiers, per-seat add-ons, and annual contracts are factored in.
The difference is bespoke software. We own what we build, it runs on infrastructure we control, and there's no licence invoice at the end of every month.
We don't fit into boxes. We build the box.
Most SaaS products are designed for the average business. They're packed with features you don't need, missing the ones you do, and they quietly force your team to reshape how they work to fit the software — rather than the other way around.
We took a different approach. When we need a tool, we ask: what does this actually need to do for our specific processes? Then we build it. The result is bespoke software that fits our business like it was made for us — because it was.
Our internal tools include:
- Quoting and job management — built around how we actually scope and price work, not how a generic platform assumes we do
- CRM and client management — a system that tracks what matters to us, with none of the overhead of platforms built for sales teams ten times our size
- Client portals — giving clients visibility into their projects without paying a per-seat fee for every contact we add
- Client-facing apps — functional, branded tools our clients actually use, running at zero ongoing licence cost
- Communication and workflow tools — bringing conversations, context, and actions into one place rather than scattered across five subscriptions
- Automation workflows — replacing repetitive manual tasks with lightweight bespoke tools that do exactly what we need
None of these required enterprise contracts, per-seat pricing, or year-long commitments. They required time, expertise, and a clear understanding of the problem.
The hidden cost of SaaS bloat
SaaS bloat costs more than just the invoice. There's the direct spend, yes — but there's also the hidden cost of your team contorting their workflows to match tools that weren't built for them.
Features go unused. Workarounds multiply. Data lives in five different places. You end up paying for integrations just to connect the tools you're already paying for. And every time you hire someone new, the bill goes up.
The alternative isn't to go without. It's to invest in bespoke software that actually reflects how your business operates — and then own it outright.
How this works for our consulting clients
This is where the model becomes genuinely powerful for other businesses.
When Daybrain works with a client on a consulting engagement, we don't just bring strategy and advice — we bring the tools. Because everything we build is hosted on our own infrastructure, our consulting clients get access to purpose-built bespoke software as part of the engagement. There's no separate SaaS subscription. No additional licence fee. No "you'll need to sign up for this platform to work with us."
They pay for the consultant. The software comes included.
That means a client working with us on their quoting process gets a custom quoting tool — built for their specific products, services, and pricing logic — without paying a quoting platform £50–£100 per user per month. A client who needs a client-facing portal gets one, branded to their business, without a portal subscription. A client who needs their workflows automated gets bespoke automation, not a growing Zapier bill.
The software is built once, runs on our infrastructure, and costs them nothing beyond the consultancy itself. When the engagement ends, they can continue using the tools we've built — or we can transition them to owning and hosting the software themselves. Either way, there's no SaaS dependency to untangle, and no subscription to cancel.
This model fundamentally changes the economics of bringing in outside help. Instead of a consulting engagement that leaves you with a slide deck of recommendations and a new stack of subscriptions to manage, you leave with working bespoke software that's already doing the job.
Why bespoke software isn't just for large enterprises
There's a persistent assumption that bespoke software development is expensive, slow, and only viable for large organisations with dedicated IT departments. That was probably true ten years ago. It isn't now.
Modern development tools, cloud infrastructure with zero base cost, and AI-assisted development have dramatically reduced the time and cost involved in building functional, professional bespoke software. What would have required a team of developers and months of work can now be built, tested, and deployed in a fraction of the time.
The result is that bespoke software is accessible to small and medium businesses in a way it simply wasn't before — and the economics make a compelling case. The upfront investment in a bespoke tool that replaces a £50/user/month SaaS subscription pays for itself quickly, and then continues saving money indefinitely.
What the right stack actually looks like
We're not anti-SaaS. There are great products out there, and Google Workspace is proof that the right tool is genuinely worth paying for. But the assumption that every business need requires a subscription — and that you should just accept the constraints and costs that come with it — is worth questioning.
The right approach is usually a hybrid: a small number of best-in-class SaaS products for genuinely universal needs (email, documents, communication), combined with bespoke software for everything specific to how your business works. That's the combination that keeps costs down, gives you tools that actually fit, and means you're not paying for someone else's feature roadmap.
Frequently asked questions
How much could bespoke software actually save my business? It depends on your current stack, but for a team of ten paying £200 per user per month in SaaS licences, moving to a bespoke-first model could reduce that to £30–50 per user — a saving of £150 or more per person, every month. For a ten-person team, that's over £18,000 a year, every year.
Do we need to host and maintain the software ourselves? Not if you work with us. Our consulting clients' tools run on our infrastructure. There's no server to manage, no database to maintain, and no DevOps overhead. It's a fully managed solution included as part of the engagement.
What happens to the software if we stop working with Daybrain? The code belongs to you. If you want to take the software in-house, host it yourselves, or hand it to another developer, you can. There's no lock-in by design — we think that's how it should work.
How does working with Daybrain reduce our SaaS costs specifically? Because the bespoke tools we build for your engagement are hosted and maintained by us, you're not paying a third-party platform for the functionality. You pay for the consultancy — the expertise, the build, the ongoing support — and the software runs as part of that. It's a fundamentally different model to being handed a list of platforms to subscribe to at the end of a project.
Is bespoke software slower to get up and running than off-the-shelf tools? For simple, well-defined needs, a bespoke tool can be built and deployed in days. For more complex systems it takes longer — but the result is software that does exactly what you need, rather than something you spend months configuring and still end up compromising on.
We already have existing SaaS tools our team relies on. Do we have to replace everything at once? No. We typically start with the highest-cost or highest-friction tools and work outward from there. Bespoke software and existing SaaS can run side by side during a transition, and some SaaS tools are worth keeping permanently — it's about building a stack that makes sense, not replacing everything for the sake of it.
The bottom line
Most businesses are paying for software shaped around someone else's assumptions about how they work. We build software shaped around how you actually work — and we've reduced our own costs to £32 per user per month to prove the model holds.
If your SaaS bill is climbing and you're not sure you're getting the value back, let's talk about what a bespoke software approach could look like for your business.