The Real Five-Year Cost of Running on SaaS

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title: "The Real Five-Year Cost of Running on SaaS" metaTitle: "The Real Five-Year Cost of Running on SaaS" metaDescription: "The honest five-year math on a typical 15-person service business running on CRM, dispatch, accounting, comms, and storage SaaS — versus owning a custom build." excerpt: "Most owners look at SaaS by the month. Once you look at it across five years for a 15-person business, the number changes shape — and so does the conversation about owning it instead." date: "2026-05-04" readTime: "10 min read" category: "Economics" coverImage: "/images/blog-stub.jpg"

The economics of SaaS work because the invoice arrives in small slices. Twenty-nine dollars per user per month doesn't feel like much. Two hundred a month for the dispatch tool is a rounding error against a payroll line. The invoices arrive, get paid, and disappear into the same expense account as office coffee and the cell-phone bill. Nobody at the company ever sits down and adds them up across five years. So nobody ever has the conversation about what the real number is.

We sat down and did the math, the way we walk through it on a Free Teardown. What follows is the honest five-year picture for a typical 15-person trades or service business in Greater Vancouver — the same kind of business that ends up across our desk every week. Then we'll do the same exercise for a custom build, with maintenance, and put the two side by side. The numbers won't be exact for any specific business, but they're close enough to make the shape of the decision obvious.

The starting stack

A typical 15-person field service business in 2026 — electrical, HVAC, plumbing, general contracting, anything where crews go to job sites — is running some combination of:

• A CRM or field service platform like ServiceTitan, Jobber, Housecall Pro, or a Salesforce setup. Per-user, per-month, with a base fee. Most of the team needs an account.
• A scheduling or dispatch tool, sometimes bundled with the above, sometimes separate. The bundle rarely fits, so most shops add a second one.
• An accounting platform — QuickBooks Online or Xero, with payroll and a couple of add-ons.
• A team communication tool — Slack, Microsoft Teams, sometimes both because half the company prefers email and the other half is in chat.
• A document and file system — Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, plus probably Dropbox or a SharePoint folder somebody set up two years ago.
• A handful of single-purpose tools — DocuSign for sign-offs, a forms tool, a payments processor, a time-tracking app, a quote builder, an invoicing tool, an expense tracker.

That's the standard kit. None of it is unreasonable on its own. All of it is necessary in some form. The question is what it costs together.

Adding it up — month one

Real ranges, observed across the businesses we talk to in BC:

• CRM / field service platform: $50–$150 per user per month, often with a $200–$500 base fee. For 15 users, plan on $1,500–$2,500/month.
• Scheduling / dispatch (when separate): $50–$200 per user per month, $750–$2,000/month for the team.
• Accounting (QuickBooks Online with payroll for 15): $200–$400/month.
• Team comms (Slack or Teams business tier): $10–$25 per user, $150–$375/month.
• Document storage (Google Workspace Business): $15–$30 per user, $225–$450/month.
• Single-purpose tools (e-sign, forms, payments add-ons, time-tracking, etc.): typically $300–$700/month combined.
• Integrations (Zapier or similar, when the tools don't talk natively): $100–$300/month.

Add it up and you get a monthly SaaS spend of roughly $3,225 to $6,725 for a 15-person service business. The midpoint sits near $5,000/month. Some shops are below this number. Plenty of shops, especially anyone running ServiceTitan plus a CRM plus add-ons, are well above it. We've seen real bills pass $9,000/month at this team size.

For the rest of this post we'll work with $5,000/month as a representative midpoint. If your number is lower, the math gets less aggressive. If it's higher — and a lot of shops are — the math gets more aggressive.

The five-year line

$5,000/month is $60,000/year. Across five years, that's $300,000 in pure subscription cost.

That number alone is the part most owners haven't seen written down. But it's not the whole picture, because SaaS prices don't stay flat. Vendors raise prices. The industry average annual price increase across business SaaS sits between 5% and 12%, depending on the segment. We'll be conservative and assume 7% annual price increases — modest by current market standards.

With 7% annual increases compounding, the same stack costs:

• Year 1: $60,000
• Year 2: $64,200
• Year 3: $68,694
• Year 4: $73,503
• Year 5: $78,648

Five-year total: $345,045 in subscription cost alone, assuming the team size stays at 15. If the business grows to 20 people during that window, the number is closer to $400,000–$450,000.

The hidden line: what the SaaS stack costs you in human time

The invoice number is only part of the cost. The other part is what your team spends every week working around the gaps between tools.

The most common patterns we see:

• Reconciliation time. Somebody — usually the office manager or operations lead — spends 4 to 8 hours a week reconciling data between systems. Job records in the CRM that don't match invoices in QuickBooks. Time entries that need to be moved manually from one tool to the other. Customer info that's right in one system and wrong in another. At a $30/hour fully-loaded rate, that's $6,000–$12,000/year.
• Re-entry time. Crews and dispatchers manually re-enter information that already exists in another system because the integration doesn't quite work. Conservatively another 2–4 hours/week across the team. $3,000–$6,000/year.
• Workaround maintenance. The shadow system — the spreadsheets and Notion pages that hold the data the SaaS can't — needs upkeep. Add $2,000–$4,000/year.
• Failed integration debugging. When Zapier breaks or the API changes and nobody notices for a week. Hard to estimate, but $1,000–$3,000/year for most shops.

Total hidden labor cost: $12,000–$25,000/year, or $60,000–$125,000 across five years. Most owners don't see this line because it's bundled into payroll, not into the software bill. But it's real, and it's a direct consequence of running on a stack that doesn't fit.

The headline number

Add the subscriptions and the hidden labor:

• Subscription: $345,000 over five years (with reasonable price increases)
• Hidden labor: $90,000 over five years (midpoint of the range)
• Five-year total cost of staying on SaaS: roughly $435,000 for a 15-person field service business.

That's not a worst case. That's the middle of the road. The high end — bigger team, more aggressive vendors, more workarounds — pushes past $600,000.

The custom build alternative

Now compare it against owning the workflow that's specific to your business. To be clear, this isn't "rip out everything and build a custom version of QuickBooks." That would be foolish and we wouldn't quote it. The right move is to build a custom internal tool that owns the workflows specific to you — typically the field service platform piece (jobs, scheduling, dispatch, quoting, invoicing logic, customer comms, field capture) — and keep the commodity tools (accounting, payments, basic email) running where they already fit.

Real numbers for that kind of build, today:

• Build cost: $35,000–$80,000, one-time. Call it $55,000 for a representative project.
• Hosting and maintenance: $200–$500/month, or roughly $3,000–$6,000/year.
• Replaces: the field service platform, the separate dispatch tool, the e-sign add-on, the time-tracking app, the customer comms tool. Often four to six SaaS tools, depending on the stack.

A typical post-build SaaS bill drops from $5,000/month to $400–$600/month — basically just QuickBooks, Stripe, Google Workspace, and whatever email tool you actually like.

Side-by-side, five years

Custom path:

• Year 1: $55,000 build + $4,500 hosting + $7,200 retained SaaS = $66,700
• Year 2: $4,500 + $7,200 = $11,700
• Year 3: $11,700
• Year 4: $11,700
• Year 5: $11,700

Five-year total: roughly $113,500.

SaaS path:

Five-year total: roughly $435,000.

The gap is north of $300,000 over five years for a single 15-person business. And — this is the part that matters more than the dollar number — at the end of five years on the custom path, you own the tool. It's an asset on your balance sheet. It scales with you. It doesn't get a price hike letter in March. It doesn't get acquired and discontinued. It doesn't decide its API is now an "enterprise feature."

At the end of five years on the SaaS path, you own nothing. You're back at the start of year six, paying again.

What this isn't

This isn't an argument that SaaS is bad or that every business should build custom. We're aggressive about telling people to stay on SaaS when staying on SaaS is the right answer — under 10 employees, generic workflows, low monthly spend, no shadow system. That's most small businesses. They should keep renting and spend their money elsewhere.

What this is: an honest accounting of the math when a business has crossed the threshold. Past 10–15 employees, past $4,000–$5,000/month in software spend, with a clearly specific workflow, the rental gets expensive in a way that's invisible until somebody adds it up. Then it's obvious.

How to find your real number

The number above is a generic 15-person business. Your actual number is different. Bigger team, you're paying more. Smaller team, you're paying less. Heavier on add-ons, you're paying more. Tighter on tooling, you're paying less. The point isn't the headline figure — it's the exercise of doing the math for your specific business and seeing the shape.

That's the Free Teardown. 30 minutes. We pull up your actual stack, walk through what each tool costs and what it does, and show you the five-year number in writing. We'll also tell you which workflows are worth bringing in-house and which ones to leave on SaaS. If the answer is "stay on SaaS," we'll say so. If the answer is "you've already paid for a custom build twice over and you're still paying," we'll show you that, too.

The thing about pricing transparency is that it cuts both ways. Once you can see the number, you can decide what to do about it. Most owners haven't seen the number yet. Once they do, the decision usually makes itself.

For pricing on the build side, see our pricing page. For what we've built before, the work speaks for itself.