How We Replaced 6 SaaS Vendors with 1 Custom Platform (and Cut Costs 80%)

The Setup

If you run a business that depends on software, you probably have a version of this problem: six different platforms, six different logins, six different monthly invoices, and none of them talk to each other properly. Your CRM holds customer data. Your affiliate tool tracks partners. Your email platform handles messaging. Your marketing automation runs campaigns. Your phone system routes calls. Your social tool schedules content. Each one costs $60 to $600 per month. Together, they add up fast.

But the subscription fees are not the real expense. The real expense is what happens between the platforms. Somebody has to connect them. Somebody has to maintain those connections. When one platform updates its API, the integration breaks. When you want to move data from your CRM into your email tool, you build a workaround. When a report requires data from three different systems, somebody spends hours reconciling numbers that should already match.

This is the standard operating model for most businesses running on SaaS. According to Productiv's 2024 SaaS report, the average company uses 371 SaaS applications, spending $9,600 per employee annually. Gartner projects global SaaS spending will exceed $247 billion in 2024 alone. The industry assumes you will keep renting. Nobody asks whether you should own instead.

What the Data Shows

The Stealth Labz operation ran on six SaaS vendors with a combined cost of $1,565 per month:

Vendor	Function	Monthly Cost	28-Month Total Spend
Konnektive CRM	Order management, CRM, affiliate tracking	$583	$9,497
TrackDesk	Affiliate tracking and payouts	$499	$5,988
Socioboard	Social media management	$143	$1,575
SendGrid/Twilio	Email and SMS messaging	$180	$1,584
Klaviyo	Email marketing automation	$60	$720
Sonetel	Phone and communications	$100	$545
Total		$1,565/mo	$19,909

Source: 28_month_financial, QB-verified vendor transactions. Costs reflect actual spend over the 28-month period February 2024 through January 2026.

On top of the subscription fees, the operation was paying contractors up to $9,046 per month at peak to manage these platforms, build integrations between them, and fix what broke. The total contractor cost over the build period reached $62,731 annually.

Flexera's 2024 State of ITAM Report found that organizations waste an average of 29% of their SaaS spend on underutilized or redundant licenses. But that statistic only captures wasted subscriptions. It does not capture the contractor hours, the integration maintenance, or the opportunity cost of working around fragmented data.

PRJ-01 replaced all six vendors. One internal platform. Built by the operator, Michael George Keating. The result:

Metric	Before	After
Monthly SaaS cost	$1,565	$0
Monthly contractor cost	$9,046 (peak)	$0
Monthly operating cost	$6,312 (avg)	~$825
Annual cost displaced	—	$82,640
Data sources	6 (fragmented)	1 (unified)
Integration points	15 (fragile)	8 (controlled)

Source: CS10, 28_month_financial. Monthly burn figures represent averages over the April through September 2025 period versus January 2026.

That is an 87% reduction in monthly operating cost, from $6,312 per month average down to approximately $825 per month for hosting and AI tools.

How It Works

PRJ-01 is a Customer Data Platform built on standard web frameworks. It consolidates every function those six SaaS vendors previously handled: customer data management, affiliate tracking, email and SMS messaging, marketing automation, analytics, and communications. All data lives in one database with 135 tables and a unified schema. All logic runs under one roof.

The platform was built in 74 active development days. It processes 616,543 leads against production data and handles 75,125 transactions. It connects to 20 external systems (12 inbound, 8 outbound) through clean, controlled integration points rather than fragile cross-vendor bridges.

The key operational difference: when something breaks in a six-vendor stack, you are debugging across platforms, waiting on vendor support tickets, and hoping their API did not change. When something breaks in your own system, you fix it directly. Every improvement benefits every part of the business simultaneously because all data and logic are already connected.

What This Means for Business Operators

According to Zylo's 2024 SaaS Management Index, organizations average $5,607 in SaaS spend per employee per year. If your business is spending $5,000 to $15,000 per month across multiple SaaS platforms, the question worth asking is: does a version of your business exist where you own the infrastructure instead of renting it?

The answer used to be "not unless you have an engineering team." The answer now: one operator with the right methodology and AI-assisted development tools built $780,000 to $1,560,000 in replacement value for $16,800 in direct build cost. The ongoing cost is $825 per month. The displaced cost is $82,640 annually.

This is a control decision as much as a cost decision. The operator who owns the infrastructure does not answer to vendors, does not depend on contractors, and does not lose sleep over integration failures. The business runs on systems the operator built, understands, and controls completely.

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Related: [C5_S102 — The Hidden Costs of SaaS: Integration Tax, Vendor Lock-In, and Data Fragmentation] | [C5_S110 — How We Eliminated $19,909 in Annual SaaS Costs] | [C5_S106 — The Integration Tax] | [C5_S103 — How to Run 10 Production Software Systems for $825/Month]

References

1. Productiv (2024). "SaaS Benchmark Report." Average SaaS application counts and per-employee spend data.
2. Gartner (2024). "SaaS Spending Forecast." Global SaaS spending projections ($247B in 2024).
3. Flexera (2024). "State of ITAM Report." SaaS license waste benchmarks (29% average underutilization).
4. Zylo (2024). "SaaS Management Index." Per-employee SaaS spend benchmarks ($5,607/year average).
5. Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: The Platform Displacement." Stealth Labz. Read case study