For the thr past two decades, I sat on the vendor side of B2B SaaS. In recent years, I watched renewal conversations change. Customers who used to haggle on price started asking a different question: why are we paying for this at all?

A few years ago, that question was mostly hypothetical. Companies would easily put down their credit cards for a SaaS product. Creating a solution in-house was expensive, slow, and risky. The SaaS argument was airtight:

That argument has broken down.

AI has collapsed the cost of building custom solutions to the point where a motivated operator (not even an engineer) can ship a working internal tool in weeks, for a fraction of an annual contract value. The math changed. The renewal conversations changed with it.

I wrote about this from the SaaS vendor’s perspective [link]. The churn reason nobody is tracking. The quiet cancellations are showing up as “budget cut” in the CRM.

That piece got a response I didn’t expect. Not from SaaS executives worried about retention numbers. From operators who recognized themselves on the other side of the table. People who had made the call. Who had built something internally and wasn’t talking about it publicly.

So I decided to gather more stories and share what I hear.

Not an analysis from the outside. Stories from the inside. Executives and operators who decided to build instead of buying. Sharing their story: What they built, why they made the call, what happened, and what they’d do differently. In their words.

The SaaS industry spent twenty years making the case for renting. Now, slowly, companies are moving towards owning.

That’s what this newsletter is for.

If you made the call to build and have a story to share, I'd like to cover it. Contact me