Stop Renting Software. Here's What We're Building Instead.

There's a conversation that happens in almost every operations and finance meeting around Q4. Someone pulls up the software renewal list. The room goes quiet. Then someone says it: "Wait, we're paying how much for that?"

It happens at five-person startups and five-hundred-person companies alike. The amounts differ, but the feeling is the same — a creeping sense that the tools meant to make your team more effective have quietly become one of your biggest cost centres.

We've felt it too. It's why Zeron exists.

The SaaS Bill No One Talks About Openly

Individual SaaS tools look affordable in isolation. Thirty dollars per seat here. Fifty per seat there. A hundred for the premium plan that has the one feature you actually need.

But SaaS sprawl compounds. A typical 50-person company runs 25 to 40 software subscriptions simultaneously. Run that through your actual headcount and suddenly you're looking at $500 to $1,000 per employee per year, before you even factor in the seats you've been paying for since someone left the team eight months ago.

The villain here isn't any single vendor. The villain is the per-seat pricing model itself — a structure that was genuinely fair in the early days of SaaS and has gradually evolved into something that benefits vendors far more than the teams using the software.

Consider what happens as a company matures. They raise funding. Growth targets go up. The product roadmap fills with enterprise features to justify moving customers into higher tiers. Pricing tiers multiply. The features your team actually uses quietly migrate to the plan above yours. And every year at renewal, the email arrives with a new number — rarely lower, often dramatically higher.

This is not an accident. It is a model. And most teams are locked into it by the time they realise how much it costs.

Why Enterprise Software Gets Away With It

Lock-in in SaaS is rarely technical. It's practical. Your team's data is in their format. Your workflows are built around their UI. Your junior staff were onboarded on their tool and would need retraining on anything else. Your integrations took months to configure.

None of that is malicious. But it is intentional. And it means that by year two with any given platform, the realistic switching cost — in time, training, and disruption — often runs to tens of thousands of dollars, even before you calculate lost productivity. Vendors know this. Their renewal pricing reflects it.

Then there's the 80/20 reality. Most teams use somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the features in any enterprise software platform. The rest was built for use cases your company doesn't have, for industries you're not in, or for enterprise buyers who demanded features in a contract negotiation years ago. You're paying for all of it regardless.

The total cost of ownership of "affordable" SaaS is rarely what it looks like in the pricing table.

What "Owning" Your Software Actually Means

When we say "Stop Renting Software. Start Owning It." — we're not talking about open-source self-hosting. That trades one set of problems for another: infrastructure management, security patching, scaling headaches. Most teams that go down that path end up spending more than they saved.

What we mean is something more practical and more honest.

Zeron works in two distinct ways, and both are built around the same core idea: you should only pay for the features your team actually uses, at a price that reflects what it costs to build and maintain them — not what the market will bear because switching is painful.

The first model is purpose-built SaaS products with transparent, fair pricing. We identify categories where the dominant tools are dramatically overpriced relative to what most teams need from them, and we build focused, well-crafted alternatives. No feature bloat. No bait-and-switch tier structures. Pricing that stays predictable.

The second model is custom SaaS replacement for teams whose situation is specific enough that off-the-shelf doesn't fit. We work with you to identify the tool in your stack that's doing the most damage to your budget, and we build a replacement that covers exactly your use case. More on this below.

Both models share something important: they're structured around your long-term interests, not ours. Month-to-month terms. Your data, exportable anytime. No vendor lock-in by design.

For each new product we launch, we also run what we call a Founding Guild — a group of 5 to 10 companies who shape the product before it reaches the wider market. Guild members give feedback, help set priorities, and get six months free when we launch. It's our way of making sure what we build actually fits the teams who need it, rather than building in a vacuum and hoping it lands.

A Real Example — Customer Support

Customer support software is one of the clearest examples of SaaS pricing that has quietly gone from reasonable to genuinely difficult to justify.

Intercom's pricing starts around $74 per seat per month for teams with real support volume. Zendesk Suite runs $55 to $115 per seat depending on the plan. Freshdesk's "Growth" plan looks affordable until you add the AI features, advanced reporting, or the call centre module — each a separate add-on.

For a 10-person support team, you're looking at $7,000 to $14,000 per year at minimum. More typically, when you factor in the features you actually need, it's closer to $18,000 to $25,000. For software that handles tickets and live chat.

Taktik is our answer to that problem. It's our first product — customer support and live chat software built for the 20% of features that 80% of support teams actually use. Ticket management, live chat, shared inbox, basic automation. Done well, without the complexity, and at a price that reflects what it actually costs to run.

We built it for ourselves first because we needed it. Then we looked at what Intercom and Zendesk were charging and decided to make it available. We wrote about why we built it here.

If your support costs feel out of proportion to what your team is getting from them, Taktik is worth a look.

The Custom Path — When Off-the-Shelf Still Doesn't Fit

Sometimes the problem isn't that a category's dominant tool is too expensive. It's that none of the tools in a category actually fit how your team works.

Your HR process has a wrinkle that no ATS handles cleanly. Your sales workflow doesn't match the assumptions baked into any CRM you've evaluated. Your operations team has built elaborate workarounds in spreadsheets because the "proper" tool for the job costs $60,000 a year and still doesn't do the one thing they need.

This is where our custom replacement service fits. We work with companies to identify a specific tool in their stack — one that's expensive, underperforming, or both — and we build a replacement that covers exactly their use case.

The obvious objection: isn't custom software expensive?

It used to be. Custom development at traditional agency or consultancy rates could easily run six figures for a meaningful product, with months of timeline and genuine uncertainty about the outcome.

Our cost structure is different, which lets us offer different terms. Fixed price, not hourly. Ten percent upfront; the rest when it works. Month-to-month after delivery. Your data stays yours.

We're not the right fit for every situation. But for teams overpaying by $30,000 or more per year on a single tool, the maths often changes quickly when the development cost looks different.

If you're curious whether your situation fits, take a look at what we offer or reach out directly. We'll tell you honestly if we can help or not.

We've also started building toward a second custom vertical — recruiting and ATS software — because the same pattern repeats: dominant tools priced for enterprise, SMBs paying far more than their use case warrants.

How We Build It Without an Army of Engineers

The practical question behind all of this is: how does a small studio build software that competes with products backed by hundreds of engineers?

The honest answer is that the economics of software development have changed significantly, and we've built our whole model around that change.

We use AI agents to handle a substantial portion of the development process — writing code, running tests, catching errors, validating behaviour. Our internal development system, Nexus, orchestrates these agents across our projects. What this means in practice is that we can build focused, well-tested software at a fraction of the cost that would have been required three years ago.

This isn't a selling point about AI. It's an explanation of why our pricing can be what it is, and why our terms can be what they are. The savings get passed to you, not kept as margin.

We've written about how this works in more detail — including the parts that are harder than they sound — in a separate post. If you're curious about the mechanics, that's the place to start.

What This Means for Your Budget in 2026

If you're heading into a software renewal cycle this year, here are three questions worth asking about any tool on your list before you sign.

One: How much of this tool does your team actually use? Not in theory — in practice. Pull usage data if you can. Talk to the people using it daily. If the honest answer is "maybe 20 to 30 percent," that's useful information.

Two: What would it take to move? Map the real switching cost: data export, retraining, integration work, timeline. If the number is smaller than you assumed, you have more options than you think. If it's genuinely large, that's worth knowing clearly before you negotiate renewal.

Three: Is this pricing tied to your growth in a way that works against you? Per-seat pricing looks fine at ten people. At fifty people it can be punishing. Understand what your bill looks like at 1.5x your current headcount before you commit.

We're not suggesting every team needs to replace their entire software stack. That would be disruptive and probably counterproductive. What we do believe is that most companies have at least one tool in their stack where the pricing has drifted well beyond what the value warrants — and where the combination of lock-in and inertia has kept them from looking seriously at alternatives.

Zeron's model is to start with one tool. Prove that a better-priced, better-fit alternative works for your team. Then decide whether there's more to do from there.

If customer support software is the place where your spend feels most out of control, Taktik is the right starting point. If the problem is somewhere else in your stack, we're happy to talk through it. No pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about whether we can help.

The SaaS pricing model isn't going to fix itself. But you don't have to wait for it to.