Self-hosted software vs SaaS and why people are dropping their subscriptions

There was a Reddit thread on r/nocode that basically said: is anyone else mass replacing their SaaS subscriptions with stuff they built and host themselves? And one comment stuck with me. It was somebody realizing that people are already doing what I do for clients. They just don't have someone to build it for them.

That makes perfect sense to me. Of course this is happening.

Why this is going to keep happening

This is getting out of hand, and I mean that. We're not all just going to keep paying monthly, forever, for a stack of software when we can now build the thing ourselves and host it ourselves. There's no reason. The tools to build got cheap and fast. The tools to rent got expensive and bloated.

So here's my honest opinion. If a company thinks it's going to survive on a monthly subscription without giving you a genuinely incredible product, without differentiating, without building an actual moat so you can't just recreate it in a weekend, that company is in trouble. The moat is the whole game now. If your software is a form, a database, and a couple of buttons, somebody's going to make their own version and stop paying you. That's not a threat. It's just what's going to happen.

What "mass replacing SaaS" actually looks like

Owning the tool instead of renting it is a different feeling than people expect. Renting means you pay every month whether you use it or not, you live inside somebody else's roadmap, and your data sits on their server. Owning means you build the exact thing you need, it runs on your hosting, and the bill mostly stops.

I've already made about twelve different apps that I use myself. One is my own Wispr Flow alternative for iPhone and Mac. Another is my own version of the MenuFit app, which I built with Claude Code because I liked the app but not the 10 bucks a month, and mine actually does more than theirs for about two dollars a month. If I'd rented all twelve as SaaS, it would've cost me at least $120 a month combined. Every single month. Forever. That's stupid. So I built them, they do exactly what I need and nothing I don't, and the monthly charge went away. That's the whole idea, just at personal scale.

Now picture that at business scale, because the waste there is wild.

The numbers are the argument

You don't have to take my word that renting software has gotten out of hand. Zylo's 2025 SaaS Management Index found that organizations are wasting an average of $21 million a year on unused SaaS licenses, a 14.2 percent jump from the year before, while total SaaS spend climbed to about $4,830 per employee.

Read that again. Twenty one million dollars a year on stuff nobody is even logging into. That's not a software problem, that's a renting problem. When you own the tool, there are no seats to forget about and no per-user creep. You build what you use.

Where the DIY crowd hits a wall

Here's the honest part, and it's exactly the thing that Reddit comment was pointing at. Wanting to replace your SaaS is easy. Actually building something that holds up is where most people stall.

The first version comes together fast. Then real life shows up. You need auth that doesn't leak, a database that won't corrupt, backups, error handling, a way to deploy updates without breaking everything, and hosting that stays up when you're asleep. That's the gap between a weekend toy and a tool you can actually run your business on. Most people can picture the app. They just don't have someone to build it right and keep it standing.

That's the part I do for people. Not wiring a few apps together with no-code duct tape. Real, custom software, built to do exactly what you need, that you own and host. I did it for a local services company that was sick of QuickBooks being slow and bloated, building them a lean React app with bank sync and AI categorization that actually understands their business. Same move every time: stop renting, own the thing.

Rent vs own, plainly

Rent SaaS when the product is genuinely great, it has a real moat, and it does something you couldn't reasonably rebuild. Pay those people happily.

Own it when the software is basically a form, a workflow, and your own data, and you're paying monthly forever for the privilege. That's the stuff getting replaced right now, and it should be.

So yeah, to whoever started that Reddit thread: people are going to do this. It's already a real thing. The only question is whether you build it yourself or get someone to build it for you.