Contents
- This is the most common concern, and it is legitimate.
- SaaS platforms ship new features on their own roadmap.
- When a SaaS platform breaks, you open a support ticket and wait.
- The risk of staying on rented platforms is rarely quantified.
The three main risks are: the system depends on a single person to maintain it (bus factor), you lose the feature updates that SaaS vendors would have provided automatically, and there is no vendor support team to call when something breaks. These are real risks. They are also manageable -- and in a documented case, each one proved less costly than the risks of staying on rented platforms.
Risk 1: Bus factor -- what if the builder is unavailable?
This is the most common concern, and it is legitimate. If one person builds a system and that person becomes unavailable, the business needs someone else who can maintain it.
The mitigation is structural: build on standard, widely-known frameworks. PRJ-01 -- a 194,954-line platform that replaced six SaaS vendors -- is built on PHP/Laravel, one of the most widely used web frameworks in the world. According to the 2024 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, PHP powers roughly 77% of websites with a known server-side language (W3Techs, 2024). The codebase is version-controlled, documented, and built on patterns any competent Laravel developer can read and maintain. The operator chose to build alone; the system does not require a single operator to run (CS10, audited).
Risk 2: No automatic feature updates
SaaS platforms ship new features on their own roadmap. When you own the system, new features only arrive when you build them.
In practice, this cuts both ways. SaaS vendors also remove features, change pricing, sunset products, and get acquired. Every vendor roadmap change is a forced migration risk. With an owned system, the operator builds what the business needs when the business needs it -- no waiting for a vendor's product priorities to align with yours, and no paying for features you never use (CS10).
Risk 3: No vendor support when something breaks
When a SaaS platform breaks, you open a support ticket and wait. When your own system breaks, you fix it yourself.
The relevant question is which scenario actually gets resolved faster. In a six-vendor stack with 15 integration points, debugging a failure means identifying which platform broke, opening tickets with multiple vendors, and hoping their APIs have not changed. In the documented case, the internally built platform runs on 8 clean, controlled integration points. The 12.1% product defect rate across the full portfolio is half to one-fifth of the industry-standard 20-50% defect range (Capers Jones, "Applied Software Measurement," benchmark data). The system is not fragile -- it has processed 616,543 leads across multiple verticals and geographies in production (CS10, audited).
The risk most operators underestimate
The risk of staying on rented platforms is rarely quantified. In the documented displacement, the total cost of the six-vendor stack plus contractor management was $82,640 per year. That is not a subscription cost -- it is an annual dependency cost. Every year the business stays on rented infrastructure, it pays that again, with no equity, no ownership, and no exit from vendor lock-in (CS10, QB-verified February 2026).
Related: What happens to custom software if the developer leaves? | Can one person maintain a custom-built business platform?
References
- W3Techs (2024). "Usage Statistics of Server-Side Programming Languages." PHP market share data for websites with known server-side technology.
- Stack Overflow (2024). "Developer Survey." Framework adoption and developer ecosystem benchmarks.
- Jones, C. "Applied Software Measurement." Industry-standard software defect rate benchmarks (20-50% range).
- Keating, M.G. (2026). "Case Study: The Platform Displacement." Stealth Labz. Read case study