You've probably read plenty about the digital revolution already. It usually comes across as a giant wave of digital technology about to change everything: AI, automation, new business models. It sounds big, but the change that matters most to businesses is a lot more down to earth. Software that used to be far too expensive to build yourself is becoming affordable.
That doesn't just change what companies can do with technology. It changes which software they buy, which processes they automate, and which licences are still worth paying for every year. Of all the digital developments happening right now, it might be one of the most important.
What is different about digital technology today?
Not long ago, custom software was mostly something big companies did. Smaller businesses had their own way of working too, but building software around it was simply too expensive. You needed developers for almost everything: designing the system, building the front and back end, connecting it to other tools, testing it, documenting it and keeping it running.
So most businesses did the sensible thing. If an existing SaaS product covered 70% or 80% of what they needed, they bought it and adjusted the way they worked to fit the software.
That trade-off is shifting. AI can now help developers with a large part of the work. They can write code faster, get to grips with existing code more quickly and spend less time on repetitive tasks. AI doesn't build great applications on its own, but it does mean less human effort goes into building good software.
And once building gets cheaper, the choice between renting software and owning it starts to look different. That's what's really driving the current digital revolution.
The digitalisation trend: from buying tools to building processes
For the last ten years or so, going digital has mostly meant buying software. A CRM for sales, a project-management tool, a platform for support, something else for reporting, and then an automation tool to make them all talk to each other.
That's fine as long as every part of your business fits neatly into a software category. In practice, it rarely does.
An order might start in your webshop, move into the CRM, go through an internal approval, land with finance and finally show up in a report.
Every extra tool adds another gap, and guess who ends up filling those gaps? Your team. They copy information, export spreadsheets, double-check systems and come up with workarounds.
You can have a lot of software and still not have a good digital process.
That's why more businesses are starting to ask a different question.
"Which tool should we buy?"
"How would this work if we could design it ourselves?"
It's a very different way of looking at technology, and it's at the heart of digital transformation for SMEs.
AI is changing the economics of software
When people talk about AI, they usually talk about jobs. For businesses, there's another effect that's just as important: what it costs to build software.
Picture one important process in your business that runs across five different tools. Each one has its own subscription, and then there are the extra users, premium features, automations and integrations on top.
Even with all that software, your team still does part of the work by hand, because none of the tools really fits the way you work.
Ten years ago, the answer was usually that custom software would cost even more. That's no longer a given.
As AI automation and AI-assisted development cut the amount of work involved, custom software starts to make financial sense sooner.
Not for every business or every process, but sooner than it used to.
A simple example
Let's take a made-up company that uses four SaaS products to run one process:
- a CRM;
- scheduling software;
- a workflow platform;
- reporting software.
Say those tools, with extra users and integrations, cost €2,000 a month.
That's €24,000 a year, or €120,000 over five years.
And at the end of it, the company still doesn't own any of that software.
Does that mean an €80,000 custom build is automatically the better choice?
Not at all.
Maybe the SaaS tools work perfectly well. Maybe the process changes all the time. Maybe maintaining custom software would cost more than it saves.
But it's now a comparison worth making.
And a custom build doesn't have to copy everything those four tools can do.
Most companies only use a fraction of the features they pay for.
If you strip out what nobody needs and build only what the process really depends on, the cost might drop to €40,000 or even €20,000, and the numbers start to look very different.
If you've been paying serious money for licences for years and your team is still working around their limits, custom software deserves a place in the calculation.
A few years ago, it rarely did.
This is an illustrative example, not an Interactivated client result.
Software is not replacing everything
None of this means every business should start building its own software. That would be exactly the kind of hype we want to avoid.
For plenty of problems, SaaS is still the smartest choice.
Use existing accounting software. Don't build your own Zoom.
And if your CRM process is fairly standard and only a handful of people use it, there's almost certainly a product that handles it well.
With hundreds of users, each on their own licence, the maths can change quickly.
Maatwerk/custom software gets interesting when the way you work is genuinely different, or when standard tools hold you back so much that your team is constantly working around them.
So SaaS isn't going anywhere.
What's changing is that you have more options.
New to the basics? Read what is SaaS first.
The old question was:
"Which product comes closest?"
Now you can also ask:
"Does buying still make more sense than building?"
From software licences to software ownership
It's easy to see why SaaS subscriptions are popular.
You don't need a big upfront investment, you pay monthly, and someone else takes care of hosting, updates and maintenance.
That convenience is worth something.
But it also means the vendor decides:
- which features get built;
- how users are priced;
- when prices go up;
- which integrations are available;
- whether a feature you rely on stays.
Per-seat pricing is a good example.
Many tools charge the same for someone who logs in once a quarter as for someone who uses them every day, so a large group of occasional users can quietly become your biggest software cost.
We're making this switch ourselves.
At Interactivated, we're about to finish an internal system that replaces Jira, monday.com, HubSpot and a few other tools we used to pay for.
It only includes the features we actually need, plus some we'd never get from a large vendor like Atlassian or HubSpot, including AI features that speed up our team's work in several areas.
From next year, it will save us around €15,000 a year on licences alone, before we even count the time the team saves.
Building it took us less than three months, and not full-time.
When you own your software, that relationship changes.
You take on more responsibility, but you also decide how it works and where it goes next.
That matters most when software stops being a simple utility and becomes part of how your business makes money.
If you're heading in that direction, the big decisions are about scope, whether to build or buy, and who owns the code, more than about the technology itself.
We go into those in our piece on digital leadership.
So this isn't about SaaS being bad and custom software being good.
The better question is which parts of your business are fine to rent, and which ones matter enough to own.
The next phase of digital technology
The first big wave of digitalisation moved almost every business process into software.
The next phase is less about adding more tools and more about software that actually fits the way your business works.
AI is speeding that up.
Development gets more efficient, integrations get easier and automation can do more.
Custom systems that never added up financially can now make sense in the right situation.
That opens up a different way of thinking about technology.
Not just as a cost, or one more monthly licence, but as something that can become part of your company.
The digital revolution is ultimately an economic shift
The changes that matter most are usually less dramatic than the headlines.
Software isn't going to replace every company tomorrow, and AI isn't suddenly taking over everything.
What's changing is the economics.
Software that used to be too expensive to build is now within reach.
Processes that used to need several standard tools stitched together can be designed as one system.
And businesses that only ever rented software, because building was never realistic, now have a real alternative.
That's the part of the digital revolution worth paying attention to.
Not that everything is new, but that more businesses can choose which technology they rent and which they own.
Is your software stack still worth renting?
If you're paying for several licences and your team still has to work around them, it might be time to run the numbers.
At Interactivated, we use AI-assisted development to build custom software and automation at a cost that was out of reach just a few years ago.
Tell us which process you're paying too much to work around, and we'll help you compare renting with owning.
We'll give you an honest answer, whichever way it goes.