The boring problem I fixed by replacing a SaaS subscription

I got tired of paying for project management software that did more than I needed.

Every tool I tried was built for a team of 20. Onboarding flows I did not need, seat licences for people who did not exist, features I would never touch, and a monthly bill for all of it regardless. I just wanted to track projects and tickets in real time, with notes attached to each one, without paying for a Kanban board, a Gantt chart, a time tracker, and a client portal I would never open.

What I built instead

So I built my own. It is called DevTracker, and the structure is deliberately small: projects hold tickets, tickets have a type, a status, and a priority, and everything syncs instantly because it runs on Firestore's real-time listeners rather than a page you have to refresh. Sign-in is Google OAuth through Firebase Auth, so I am not managing a separate password, and neither is anyone else I add to a project.

That is the whole feature list. No feature I do not use, no subscription I am paying for out of habit, no seat count to think about because I own the thing outright. I use it every day now, for my own work and for client projects, and it has never once asked me to upgrade my plan.

The pattern underneath the story

Here is the pattern I keep running into with small business owners, and it is rarely just one subscription. It is three overlapping ones: a project tool, a CRM, an invoicing app, each covering a slice of what the business actually needs, and nobody has added up the total in a while because the charges are small enough individually to ignore. Twenty-five dollars here, forty there. It is not that the tools are bad tools. Most of them are genuinely well built. It is that most businesses end up renting five percent of a hundred-percent tool, forever, because the tool was built to sell to a company much bigger than theirs.

Run the actual math on that sometime. Three tools at thirty to fifty dollars a month each is over a thousand dollars a year, every year, indefinitely, for capability most of it never gets used. Compare that to a fixed-fee build that does exactly the narrow thing you need and stops there: after the first year or two, owning it outright is usually the cheaper option, and it is always the more predictable one. No surprise price increase when the vendor changes their tier structure. No feature you rely on getting moved behind a higher-priced plan.

When this is (and is not) the right call

To be fair, this is not the right move for every tool. If you need something broadly used, well documented, and supported by a huge ecosystem, like accounting software or email, renting the SaaS is usually still the smarter choice, building your own general ledger is not a good use of anyone's time. Where it makes sense to replace a SaaS subscription with a custom tool is the narrow, specific, repetitive piece of your workflow: the internal tracker nobody outside your team touches, the intake form that only ever needs three fields, the dashboard that exists to answer one question you ask every week.

Sometimes the fix is not a bigger integration between the tools you already have. It is building the one narrow thing you actually need, in a form you own outright, and turning off the rest.

If you are staring at a SaaS bill wondering whether you are paying for a hundred percent of a tool to get five percent of the value, that is a conversation worth having. Reach out through the contact section and I will tell you honestly whether it is worth building or whether you should just keep the subscription.