Why 35% of Enterprises Already Replaced Their SaaS Tools in 2026
Someone on your team is paying for a SaaS subscription right now that does about a fifth of what your business actually needs it to do. You know this. You've known it for a while. The workaround spreadsheet next to it has become part of the process, and nobody questions it anymore because that's just how the tool works.
For most of the last decade, that was simply the cost of doing business. Building something custom meant months of development, a six figure budget, and a level of engineering commitment most companies couldn't justify for an internal tool. So you paid for the subscription, adapted your workflow around its limitations, and moved on.
That calculation just changed, and it changed fast enough that most leadership teams haven't caught up to it yet.
The Number That Should Get Your Attention
Retool's 2026 Build vs. Buy Report surveyed over 800 enterprise builders and found that 35% of teams have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom build. Not planned to. Already have. And 78% expect to build more custom internal tools this year.
That's not a niche trend among a handful of aggressive engineering teams. That's more than a third of enterprises actively walking away from tools they used to consider non-negotiable.
The report also found that every SaaS category is now under replacement pressure. Workflow automation and internal admin tools lead the list, but CRMs, BI platforms, project management software, and customer support tools are all facing the same scrutiny.
What Actually Changed
Two things moved at once, and each one alone would have mattered. Together they flipped the equation.
On the build side, agentic coding tools cut the engineering time needed to scaffold, test, and integrate custom software down to a fraction of what it used to take. A custom CRM that would have cost 50 to 150 thousand dollars to build in 2023 can now be built in a couple of days for a few hundred dollars in platform fees plus the time it takes to describe what you actually need. That is not a modest improvement. That is a different category of decision entirely.
On the buy side, 2026 has been a hard lesson in what renting software actually costs over time. SaaS consolidation accelerated, with thousands of M&A deals closing in the past year alone, and every acquisition brings the risk of repricing, feature changes, or a product getting shut down entirely. Vendors have also gotten more aggressive about layering consumption based charges onto existing subscriptions. And platforms that used to be finished, ready to use workflows have started turning into API layers you build agents on top of, rather than something that just works out of the box.
The build vs buy question used to be settled almost entirely by budget. It isn't anymore.
Where the Math Actually Flips
This doesn't mean building always wins. It means the break even point moved substantially, and for a specific set of situations, it moved past where most companies expect it to be.
The math tends to favor building when a few things are true at once. Your team size for a given tool sits in the range where per seat SaaS pricing adds up fast, often somewhere between 15 and 50 users. Your workflow diverges meaningfully from what the SaaS product assumes a typical customer needs. And the tool doesn't carry heavy compliance or audit requirements that a vendor has already solved and certified.
Buying still wins clearly in a few specific situations. Regulatory environments with strict audit trail and e-discovery requirements. Tools where you need a vendor's support team and SLA infrastructure because downtime is genuinely costly. And commodity functions where standing up something custom would just be reinventing a wheel that already works fine.
Most decisions live somewhere in between, which is exactly why treating this as a single binary choice made across the whole business, rather than workflow by workflow, is where companies get it wrong.
The Trap on Both Sides
There's a failure mode building into this shift that doesn't get talked about enough. Retool's same report found that 60% of respondents have built software outside of IT oversight in the past year, and a quarter say they do it frequently. Development speed has outpaced governance, and a growing amount of custom software is getting built with nobody outside the person who built it aware it exists.
That creates its own version of the problem custom software was supposed to solve. A tool nobody else understands, running a process nobody else can maintain, built without the security review or data handling standards the rest of your stack goes through.
The businesses getting genuine value from this shift aren't the ones building everything, everywhere, as fast as possible. They're the ones who brought some structure to the decision. Someone still evaluates whether a given workflow should be built or bought. Someone still reviews what gets built before it touches customer data or a production system. The speed changed. The need for that discipline didn't.
What This Means for Your Next Software Decision
If you're currently paying for a SaaS tool that your team has built workarounds around, it's worth running the numbers again, even if you ran them two years ago and buying won the argument. The cost of building dropped enough, and the cost of renting climbed enough, that a decision made in 2023 may not hold in 2026.
That doesn't mean defaulting to build for everything. It means the decision deserves an actual look rather than an assumption carried over from a market that no longer exists.
Common Questions About Build vs Buy in 2026
Is it actually cheaper to build custom software now than it was a few years ago?
For many project types, yes, substantially. Agentic development tools have cut the engineering time required to scaffold, test, and integrate custom applications, which directly reduces the cost of building something that would have required a much larger team and budget in 2023.
Does this mean businesses should stop buying SaaS altogether?
No. Buying still makes sense for commodity functions, tools with heavy compliance requirements, and situations where a vendor's support and SLA infrastructure genuinely matters. The shift means more workflows now belong on the build side of the line, not that the line disappeared.
How do we know if a specific tool is a good candidate for replacement?
Look at team size for that tool, how far your workflow has drifted from what the SaaS product assumes, and whether the function carries compliance requirements a vendor has already solved. If your team size sits in a range where per seat costs add up quickly and your workflow has meaningfully diverged from the product's design, it's worth evaluating.
What is the risk of moving too fast on custom builds?
None of this removes the need for someone who knows what they're doing. Cheaper tooling doesn't replace architectural judgment, security review, or the integration work that connects a new tool to everything else in your stack. It just removes the excuse to skip evaluating the decision properly, and raises the number of people who will attempt a build without that judgment in place.
At Emphasis Tech, we run the evaluation on whether a specific workflow should be built or bought, and we build the ones that come out the other side of that decision. If you're sitting on a SaaS subscription your team has built a workaround culture around, it's worth a conversation before you renew it again. Visit emphasistech.com/services/application-development to talk to our team.