New research: The State of SaaS: Build vs. Buy, October 2026.The State of SaaS, October 2026. Read the report
Leave old software behind.
Anonymous reviews and real bills from teams fed up with SaaS, plus what they switched to.
What Buyers Are Saying
“Renting our core infrastructure. Moving off Heroku to AWS alone was like adding $300 a month in MRR.”
“We discontinued Zapier when they sent us a 600% price increase (not even joking).”
“"A gorgeous situation": ServiceNow's CEO celebrates a shrinking workforce.”
Newest alternatives and builders
MavenUp
Built for you
MavenUp is an AI automation company that identifies the business processes worth automating, builds production AI systems that handle them end to end, and hands
AFFiNE
AI-native alternative
Open-source knowledge base with AI for docs, whiteboards, and team collaboration.
AltStack
Built for you
Custom software built for your workflows, delivered in a week, yours to keep forever.
Codimite
Built for you
Move your contact center off Five9 and onto Dialpad Support, an AI-native contact center with real-time agent assist, live sentiment and automatic QA built in.
Most activity this month
Adobe
#1+32 this month
From $19.99 /mo
List price · teams pay $840/yr (10 teams)
Salesforce
#2+31 this month
From $25 /user/mo
List price · teams pay $40,000/yr (8 teams)
HubSpot
#3+31 this month
$20 – $150 /user/mo
List price · teams pay $30,000/yr (9 teams)
Microsoft
#4+20 this month
$5,300 /yr
Median of 6 teams
AWS
#5+18 this month
$6,500 /yr
Median of 7 teams
QuickBooks
#6+17 this month
From $38 /mo
List price · teams pay $1,200/yr (11 teams)
Webflow
#7+17 this month
From $15 /mo
List price · teams pay $752/yr (9 teams)
Evernote
#8+15 this month
$228 /yr
Median of 5 teams
From teams who pay for it
Adobe
Do not standardize on Adobe. There are better alternatives for everything they offer.
QuickBooks
Monthly subscription is growing and Intuit is stealing accountants clients.
Freshdesk
“@FreshworksInc You guys are beyond dissapointing. We pay over $10,000 annually to Freshdesk yet a single seat payment was pending and you switched off my entire company. Its been 3 hours with no resolution we have 60 seats and 100s of emails pending.”
Varun Sarda · @TheSarda
Salesforce
“The Core edition replaces the old Enterprise edition, and its price goes up from $175 per user per month to $195, and now includes 500,000 Flex Credits.”
Salesforce
Slack
It gets slower almost every Day. We are on slack since 2015 and have seen the degeneration of the product. Since they are Salesforce things got worse.
Workday
Impossible to remember where things are. Terrible ergonomy dating from Soviet Era. Slow!
Teams that built their own
Pieter Levels runs sites with 20,000 paying customers on about $300 a month after Claude Code found about $34,000 a month in cuts. Here is each line item.
Simon Høiberg moved 4 SaaS products off AWS to 3 rented Hetzner servers. The bill fell from close to $8,000 a month to around $300, about $92,400 a year.
Monthly research
October 2026· Final edition
268
AI-native alternatives and builders listed, replacing 203 tools
Most new alternatives
Read the October 2026 report
