When a 15-to-60 person company pays per-seat subscription fees for a portal, configurator, or internal tracker that only fits 40% of its workflow, renting software becomes more expensive than owning it within 14 months. At Qann, we build custom web applications, regulated client portals, and internal tools from €4,699 fixed fee with €0 per-seat charges and full source-code handover.
Look at your company's bank statement from last month. Count how many software subscriptions bill you per user, per seat, or per contact tier. Then ask your team how many of those tools still require a Friday afternoon CSV export into Excel just to get the real work done.
If you are paying per seat and still using a spreadsheet to bridge the gap, you are paying rent on a broken tool.
01The 3-year math: SaaS per-seat rent vs. software you own
Modern AI-assisted engineering has permanently changed the economics of custom software. Five years ago, building a custom B2B configurator or client portal cost €45,000 and took six months. Today, an experienced operator team builds, tests, and deploys the exact tool your business needs in 3 to 6 weeks for a one-time fixed fee.
| Cost & Control Dimension | Typical Per-Seat SaaS Stack (25 Users) | Custom Software Built by Qann (/services/software) |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront build cost | €1,500 to €3,000 onboarding fee | €4,699 (internal tool) to €6,299+ (client portal) fixed fee |
| Annual seat & tier fees | €12,000 to €24,000 / year (rises every time you hire) | €0 / seat forever (unlimited staff, clients, and partners) |
| 3-year total cost (TCO) | €37,500 to €75,000 | €5,400 to €9,500 (build + €20 to €60/mo cloud hosting) |
| Workflow fit | You adapt your business to the vendor's generic fields | Built around your exact SKUs, compliance gates, and ERP |
| Code & data ownership | Locked inside vendor database; exports throttled | 100% yours (GitHub repo, PostgreSQL database, deployment keys) |
02Four production systems we built instead of renting SaaS
Every time we build custom software, we strip away the 80% of bloated SaaS menus nobody clicks and engineer the exact 20% that moves revenue or protects compliance:
- Martian Grow (Unified 5-in-1 Portal): Instead of stitching together five separate SaaS subscriptions for ERP, member community, gated batch tracking, e-commerce, and knowledge base, we built one custom software portal with four role tiers (
public,member,partner,internal). - Maple Birds (Regulated Canadian Immigration Portal): Generic legal CRMs overwhelm visa applicants with 40-field forms and unverified document uploads. We built a CICC-compliant client portal using progressive disclosure: applicants see one next action at a time, CRS points calculate deterministically, and Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultants review a clean verification queue.
- Blunt Engineering (9-Language Industrial Cell Configurator): Off-the-shelf e-commerce plugins cannot configure a 4-cell industrial cleanroom line across 36 machinery SKUs and 9 languages (including right-to-left Hebrew). We built an interactive production-cell configurator that maps throughput (
3,600 carts/hr) directly to engineering dossiers. - Medical Cannabis Index & Global Peptide Index (Structured Reference Databases): Custom-engineered data platforms indexing 100+ sovereign legal frameworks, clinical formularies, CAS molecular numbers, and HPLC purity benchmarks with instant faceted search and zero third-party CMS bloat.
03When to rent vs. when to build
We are not ideological about custom code. Keep renting SaaS for commodity infrastructure: email (Google Workspace), payments (Stripe), and core accounting ledgers (Odoo).
Build custom software you own when:
- You pay per external user: Client portals, dealer ordering dashboards, or partner onboarding systems where per-seat SaaS pricing punishes you for growing.
- Your competitive edge lives in the workflow: Interactive hardware configurators, ROI calculators (WallJet, Expo Lightbox), or regulated intake funnels.
- Your team bridges two tools with a spreadsheet: A single custom internal dashboard connected directly to your database eliminates manual copy-paste permanently.