Your SaaS budget will grow 22% this year.
Ours doesn't.

Workday HCM had been live for 4 years on a 5-year contract with a 9% renewal uplift coming. The HR team had two full-time 'Workday certified' admins, and every absence-policy change for the clinical rota involved an external consultant. Mobile experience was hated by clinical staff doing shift-bidding.

Workday HCM contract ≈ £420k/year all-in (licences + premium support). Two certified admins on £75k each. Average ~£90k/year on Workday-certified consultants for business-process changes. Total: ~£660k/year on the HR plane alone — before Finance.

• ✕Workday Adaptive Planning (kept; not in scope)
• ✕Talent + Succession modules — used only for the exec layer
• ✕Workday Studio integrations — replaced by three Python scripts
• ✕Most of the 1,200+ business-process steps inherited from the implementation partner
• ✕The mobile app — staff used a custom shift-bidding tool anyway

A bespoke HCM module covering worker profiles, multi-region absence (NHS-aligned rota rules), performance reviews, comp planning and a clinical-grade shift-bidding flow. Business processes are TypeScript state machines reviewed in PRs. Payroll exports nightly to PayFit. Workday Finance and Adaptive Planning stay where they are.

Sales, success and finance all lived in Salesforce Enterprise. New seats triggered Process Builder rework every quarter, and the only certified admin had a 6-week ticket queue. Reps were exporting to spreadsheets to do work the CRM was supposed to do.

60 Sales Cloud Enterprise seats at $165/user/month plus Sales Engagement add-on and a part-time external admin: roughly €200k all-in. The 6% August list-price rise had already added €11k to the renewal quote on the table.

• ✕Most of Sales Cloud's 'editions' features (Forecasting, Territories, CPQ)
• ✕Einstein activity-capture — turned off after compliance review
• ✕Salesforce Inbox / Outlook integration (reps used Gmail directly)
• ✕Most validation rules and approval flows — silently bypassed by reps
• ✕Tableau dashboards bundled with the renewal

An eight-week build: a leads + opportunities + accounts schema in Postgres, a Kanban pipeline with three named stages, Gmail sync via Google Workspace API, and six fixed dashboards their CRO actually opens. RBAC is three roles, defined in code. We ran Salesforce read-only for 30 days; the team voted to kill it after week two.

Klaviyo's per-profile billing meant every Shopify customer — active, lapsed, or suppressed — pushed the bill higher. SMS markup on UK numbers compounded it. The marketing team used three flows and one segment library, but paid for the whole platform.

250,000 profiles on Email + SMS landed at $2,400/month list (~£22k/yr) before Reviews and CDP add-ons. SMS Twilio markup ran another ~£8k/yr at peak. Effective spend, including the CDP upsell: £40k+ a year and climbing.

• ✕Reviews product — bought, never launched
• ✕CDP add-on — they had a warehouse already
• ✕Most Forms & Popups templates
• ✕Predictive analytics (LTV/CLV) — they queried Shopify directly
• ✕Most channels: WhatsApp, mobile push, in-app

Profiles live in their own Postgres schema, deduped by email and phone. Flows run on Inngest; sends go through Resend (email) and Twilio direct (SMS, no markup). Three flows — welcome, abandoned cart, post-purchase — ported in week one. Suppressed profiles flip a boolean instead of inflating the bill.

Customer support volume tripled during exam season. Intercom Advanced at $85/agent plus Fin AI at $0.99 per resolution sent monthly costs from $7k to $19k in a single quarter — and Fin was counting frustrated drop-offs as 'resolutions'. Forecasting support cost month-to-month became impossible.

80 Advanced seats (~€60k/yr) + Proactive Support Plus add-on (€7k/yr) + Copilot at €25/agent (€21k/yr) + Fin resolutions averaging €9k/month at peak. All-in: €180k/year heading toward €240k as automation 'improved'.

• ✕Most Workflow Builder nodes — only 4 of 30+ triggers in active use
• ✕WhatsApp and Messenger channels (their users live in email and Slack)
• ✕Series outbound campaigns — paying for it, sending nothing
• ✕Custom reports — same 3 dashboards opened every Monday
• ✕Help Center hosted on intercom.help (no SEO equity)

Postgres-backed inbox with email-in and Slack triage; Claude-backed AI assist wired to their own help articles. Resolutions are defined by *the team*, not by the customer disappearing. Help Center moved to MDX on their own domain, picked up Google rankings within six weeks.

120 Jira + Confluence seats sat at the heart of matter-management and knowledge-base workflows. Jira's workflow engine had been customised to model legal-matter stages; Confluence's search was the joke of the firm. Marketplace apps for time-tracking and Gantt added 30% to the bill. Renewal increases of 12% YoY.

120 Jira Premium seats (~$16/user/month, ~£23k/yr) + 90 Confluence Premium seats (~£14k/yr) + 6 Atlassian Marketplace apps (~£18k/yr) + an Atlassian Solution Partner on retainer (£35k/yr). Total: ~£90k/year on the Atlassian-shaped problem.

• ✕Most of Jira's 800+ workflow steps inherited from the consulting build
• ✕Marketplace Gantt + Time-tracking apps replaced overnight by the rebuild
• ✕Confluence Whiteboards and Databases (Premium-only features)
• ✕Jira's automation rule cap on the lower tier — they paid Premium just for headroom
• ✕Confluence's full-text search — nobody trusted it

Matters become first-class records in Postgres with a state-machine engine reviewed in PRs. Knowledge base is MDX + Typesense — search returns the right document in 80ms. Time-tracking is one column on the matter table. Confluence read-only for 90 days; nobody asked for it back.