The Subscription Graveyard. Real numbers on what your SaaS stack actually costs.
We modeled what 40-person teams spend on SaaS over 10 years. The number is worse than you think.
Call the place where your SaaS subscriptions accumulate the Subscription Graveyard.
You don't think of it as a graveyard because the tools still work. They send invoices every month. They email you feature updates. They feel alive.
But nothing's getting buried there. Nothing is getting paid off. Nothing converts into an asset on your books. The money goes in, the subscriptions stay, and year after year you spend more for the same category of capability.
This is a cost model on what that actually looks like.
The baseline stack
A typical 40-person services company runs something like this:
- CRM: HubSpot Professional or Salesforce, $1,200/mo
- Project management: Monday or Asana, $600/mo
- Communication: Slack Business, $600/mo
- Support: Intercom or Zendesk, $800/mo
- Email/docs: Google Workspace, $500/mo
- Accounting: QuickBooks + a payroll add-on, $400/mo
- Automation: Zapier or Make, $200/mo
- Analytics + BI: Amplitude or Looker light, $400/mo
- Forms + signing: Typeform + DocuSign, $300/mo
- Misc: password manager, DNS, monitoring, $500/mo
Total: $5,500/mo. Call it $6,000 with headroom for the tools I forgot.
What happens over 10 years
SaaS prices grow. Gartner puts the average at 11% a year. Let's be nice and use 8%.
- Year 1: $72,000
- Year 5: $98,000
- Year 10: $133,000
Cumulative over 10 years: $1,041,000.
You read that right. One point oh four million dollars for a 40-person team on a conservative stack. Before any headcount growth.
And that's just the subscriptions. That doesn't include the 20-40 hours a week your ops team spends doing work your SaaS can't do. At $55/hour loaded, 30 hours a week is another $85,800/year. Ten years: $858,000.
Total cost of "running on SaaS" for a 40-person services company over a decade: ~$1.9M.
What you own at the end
Nothing.
The HubSpot contracts renew. The Slack workspaces still cost the same per seat. Zapier keeps doing what it does, which is run simple if-this-then-that rules. Nobody on your team can modify the underlying logic because the underlying logic lives on someone else's servers.
Worse: when you sell the business, your buyer inherits the subscriptions. They don't buy an asset, they buy a liability that renews every month.
What owning looks like
A proper Foundry Build covers roughly 60-70% of what that stack does, but built specifically for your operation. Your CRM data flows. Your communications flows. Your ops automations. Your dashboards. Your support agent.
It doesn't replace everything. You'll still run Google Workspace for email, still pay for password management, still need some kind of accounting tool. Call that the "keep" bucket: $2,500/mo instead of $6,000/mo.
Ongoing retainer to maintain your owned system: $8-12k/mo, decreasing over time.
Year one total: $95k build + $120k retainer + $30k keep-bucket = $245k.
Years 2-10: $90k retainer + $30k keep-bucket per year, averaging down = roughly $1.1M.
Ten-year total: ~$1.35M. Less than the SaaS-only math. And at the end you own a system worth meaningful cap-ex on your books.
Where this breaks
Three places the math flips against building:
Very small teams. Under 10 people, the SaaS math stays cheap. Build isn't worth it yet.
Very standardized workflows. If your ops is truly identical to everyone else's (pure e-commerce, pure real estate listings), standard SaaS + Zapier covers you. No custom needed.
No technical sponsor. You need somebody internal who can evaluate what the system does. Without that, you end up with a custom build nobody understands.
Outside those three cases, owning beats renting. Not by a little. By $400k+ over a decade.
Run your own numbers
We built a calculator that models this for your specific situation. Three sliders: SaaS spend, team size, manual hours. Live math on what 10 years of renting costs versus a one-time build.
Or run the audit for the full personalized breakdown.
SaaS companies have been marketing "subscription = easy" for 15 years. It is easy. It's also $1.9M you never see again.
Own the system. It's cheaper, it's yours, and it's on your books.