There’s a version of business software history that most Calgary founders lived through without ever naming it. Twenty-Five years ago, if your company needed a tool that didn’t exist off the shelf, you built it. That meant hiring developers, standing up servers, and sinking real capital into something you then had to maintain forever. It was slow, expensive, and risky — and for most businesses, it was the only option.
Then SaaS arrived and broke that model wide open. Why build and own a system when you could subscribe to one for a few hundred dollars a month? No servers, no dev team, no maintenance. You were live in an afternoon. It was a genuinely better deal, and it deserved to win. An entire generation of businesses — including plenty here in Calgary — was built on the back of that trade.
But the bargain has quietly inverted, and I don’t think enough people have said it out loud.
The subscription you signed up for isn’t the one you have now
Walk into almost any growing Calgary business today and count the SaaS logins. It’s rarely fewer than a dozen. Each one solved a real problem when it was adopted. Together they’ve become a different kind of problem entirely.
The costs climb every renewal, and they climb whether or not you’re getting more value. The tools never quite fit how your business actually works, so your team bends its process around the software instead of the other way around. The feature you desperately need sits in a backlog behind ten thousand other customers, and the mission-critical request you submitted two years ago never came. Your data lives in someone else’s system, exported only when they allow it and formatted how they choose. And every one of those platforms half-solves the job, overlapping with three others you’re also paying for.
SaaS became the thing it originally replaced: expensive, rigid, and built for someone else’s business rather than yours. The difference is that when custom software was the incumbent, at least you owned it.
What actually changed
For years, the reason nobody went back to building custom was simple math. Building was expensive and SaaS was cheap, so you tolerated the sprawl. That math has broken.
AI has collapsed the cost of building software. A small team using modern AI tooling can now produce, in weeks, what used to take a department months — and produce it fitted precisely to how a specific business operates. Not a generic tool aimed at a market segment, but the actual thing that business needs, built around its real workflow, owned outright.
The number that used to make custom software a luxury now competes head-to-head with a stack of SaaS subscriptions. And a custom build doesn’t come with an annual price increase, doesn’t hold your data hostage, and doesn’t make you wait in line behind ten thousand strangers for the feature that would change your quarter.
The model SaaS killed is coming back
This is the shift worth naming. The economics that made SaaS inevitable have reversed, and the thing it displaced — custom software you own, fitted to your business — is becoming the smarter buy again for a growing number of companies.
I want to be fair about it: SaaS isn’t going anywhere, and it shouldn’t. For commodity functions that every business runs the same way — email, payroll, accounting — subscribing is still the right call, and it always will be. Nobody should build their own payroll system. The shift isn’t “SaaS is dead.” It’s that the line between what you buy and what you build has moved, and it’s still moving. Work that was obviously “just buy the tool” three years ago is increasingly “we could build exactly what we need for about the same money, and own it.”
What we’re watching across our own clients — and most of them are not tech companies, they’re nonprofits, trades businesses, energy service firms — is that once a business sees a system built for how it actually works, it stops wanting to rent a compromise. The subscription that was supposed to be the easy answer starts to look like the expensive one.
SaaS had its run. It earned it. But the ground underneath it has shifted, and for the first time in twenty years, owning your software is winning the argument again.
Kevin Barton is Co-Founder and COO of Thrive Creative, a Calgary-based Development Department as a Service (DDaaS) company that embeds as the full engineering department for growing businesses. Thrive works with nonprofits, Indigenous-owned organizations, and companies across the trades, energy, and professional services sectors.
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