Audit your stack — actually audit it
Open your bank statement. List every recurring SaaS charge. Tag each one: 'essential', 'we use 10% of it', 'we forgot we had it'. Most SMEs find 30–40% of their stack falls in the bottom two categories.
Cancel the forgotten ones. Renegotiate the 10%-utilised ones. For the essentials, ask: is this worth ₹X/month forever, or is it worth ₹Y once?
When buying is right (most of the time)
Tools that handle universal workflows millions of teams use the same way: email (Gmail), payments (Razorpay/Stripe), code hosting (GitHub), accounting (QuickBooks/Tally), video calls (Google Meet). Don't even think about building these. The vendor's economy of scale crushes anything in-house.
When building is right
Workflows specific to your business model. Multi-store inventory for a jewellery house. Bid-room collaboration for a construction firm. Cohort progress tracking for an edtech. Vendor commission splits for a real-estate brokerage. Things SaaS tools handle 60%-correctly, with you spending engineering hours making up the 40%.
Rule of thumb: if you'd pay >₹2L/year to a SaaS tool to do something it does imperfectly, and an engineer could build the right version in 3 months — build.
The math no one shows you
SaaS tool A: ₹2L/year. 5 years = ₹10L. You don't own anything.
Custom build of the same: ₹3L one-time + ₹30K/year hosting. 5 years = ₹4.5L. You own the source code and can extend it forever.
At year 3 the custom version is already cheaper. At year 5 it's less than half. And the SaaS price went up every year.
The hidden tax: stitching
12 SaaS tools means 11 Zapier connections, 8 webhook handlers, 6 'why did this break this morning' incidents per quarter. Each integration is a fragile link maintained by someone on your team who has other things to do.
Owned systems eat their own integrations. The CRM speaks to the billing system directly because they're the same codebase. No Zapier in between.
Buy what's universal. Build what's yours. Audit your stack once a year — the savings fund the next build.
14+ years across e-commerce, CRM, automation, and performance marketing. Builder by instinct, marketer by training.
More from Aatmik and the field.
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