Salesforce. Wordpress. Shopify. Mailchimp. These platforms are the staple of many if not most smaller businesses. Sure, it’s all about what you do with them that sets you apart from the crowd. But aren’t they also defining you? In ways that you might not realise?

The promise of SaaS was giving small businesses access to enterprise-grade tools without the overhead. But there’s a hidden cost: homogenisation. When everyone uses the same stack, differentiation becomes a challenge.

SaaS platforms excel at streamlining operations, but they also impose their own workflows, designs, and even customer interactions. Over time, your business can start to feel like a "template" of the platform itself.

You’re paying for features you don’t need, while missing the ones that could truly set you apart.

Every cycle the prices go up, and quality goes down. There’s even a word for this: enshittification.

Small to medium-sized businesses typically don’t have their own software development team. In fact, due to SaaS taking over most network tasks (looking at you, Microsoft 365), they wouldn’t even have IT people.

That means SaaS is their only choice. Or is it?

With the coming of AI coding agents, there’s another promise materialising.

Now, AI coding agents are making it possible for SME to compete with SaaS.

We’re specialised in building custom software applications for clients with a unique approach to product. We’ve been creating home-grown alternatives for typical candidates for SaaS solutions for years, long before AI went mainstream. For our clients, but also for ourselves.

Admittedly, as we’re a software company, we have a head start.

Our custom accounting application uses APIs to gather information from sources such as our hosting platform and other online platforms to combine them into customer invoices.

We built a monitoring platform that does health checks on the applications we run for our clients, and that also does tasks such as checking for security threats that we should take action on.

A platform we call Worklogs makes it super easy for our developers to log their time, and, crucially, is the source of our reporting process that sends weekly and monthly emails to clients informing them about how we are helping their businesses thrive.

Again, these platforms were all built before building accelerated tenfold by using AI coding agents.

Plus, very early on, just after AI went mainstream, our custom application ContentAssist is helping non-tech employees choose models and define their own prompts.

Now that AI coding agents are making software development so much easier and less costly, custom solutions are within reach of SME’s.

But how are you as a company going to wean yourself off big SaaS?

Start from the place where you’re unique. Your data.

SaaS platforms tend to lock you into their ecosystems, sometimes purposefully making it hard to extract your data. By building custom tools that centralise your data in your own infrastructure, you regain control.

Not every SaaS tool needs to be replaced at once. Start with tools that directly impact customer experience, operational efficiency, or revenue (like our Worklogs or ContentAssist platforms).

Not all SaaS is bad. Replace Google Docs? Really? Obviously no. Replace tools that constrain your uniqueness.

Build bridges. Use APIs to connect custom tools with existing SaaS platforms. Our monitoring platform, for example, integrates with SaaS tools but adds proprietary value on top.

Use AI agents. Can turn a rough idea into a functional prototype in hours, not weeks.

Build small, focused tools that solve specific problems (e.g., invoicing, monitoring, time logging). This avoids the bloat of all-in-one SaaS suites.

SMEs, change your mindset, you can again be the steward of your IT systems.

SMEs need to see themselves as capable of owning their tech stack. AI coding agents are the catalyst for this shift, but the real power lies in data ownership and independence.

Are there any numbers on SME using vibe coding or coding agents to free themselves from the worst of big SaaS? Not so much as yet. But with more than 80% of developers running AI tools in the course of a day’s work, many running multiple simultaneously, the shift is bound to be noticeable and quantifiable soon.

It’s not only that coding agents can speed up work on your systems, it makes it far easier to adjust when needed. A refactor is no longer a costly challenge, but a quick prompt and a deployment away.

For SMEs that want to differentiate themselves from the rest, but lack an in-house team, partnering with companies that specialise in AI-augmented custom development can bridge the gap.

Companies like ours.

Just saying.

Image: David and Goliath, Guillaume Courtois, around 1655