New research: The State of SaaS: Build vs. Buy, October 2026.The State of SaaS, October 2026. Read the report
Leave old software behind.
Anonymous reviews and real bills from teams fed up with SaaS, plus what they switched to.
Newest alternatives and builders
Create8
Built for you
Go beyond the limits of Shopify themes with custom Shopify development.
Flux
Built for you
Flux builds custom headless Shopify Plus storefronts on Hydrogen, Sanity and Shopify's APIs.
Kombai
AI-native alternative
Kombai is an AI design engineer for builders and engineers who design and ship websites and product interfaces end to end.
Cornerstone PM
AI-native alternative
Cornerstone PM™ is the Buildertrend alternative for home builders who repeat floorplans, run multi-community pipelines, and want AI that takes real actions.
Most activity this month
Salesforce
#1+31 this month
From $25 /user/mo
List price · teams pay $40,000/yr (8 teams)
HubSpot
#2+31 this month
$20 – $150 /user/mo
List price · teams pay $30,000/yr (9 teams)
Adobe
#3+30 this month
From $19.99 /mo
List price · teams pay $840/yr (10 teams)
Microsoft
#4+20 this month
$5,300 /yr
Median of 6 teams
AWS
#5+18 this month
$6,500 /yr
Median of 7 teams
Webflow
#6+17 this month
From $15 /mo
List price · teams pay $752/yr (9 teams)
QuickBooks
#7+16 this month
From $38 /mo
List price · teams pay $1,200/yr (11 teams)
Evernote
#8+15 this month
$228 /yr
Median of 5 teams
From teams who pay for it
Freshdesk
“@FreshworksInc You guys are beyond dissapointing. We pay over $10,000 annually to Freshdesk yet a single seat payment was pending and you switched off my entire company. Its been 3 hours with no resolution we have 60 seats and 100s of emails pending.”
Varun Sarda · @TheSarda
Salesforce
“The Core edition replaces the old Enterprise edition, and its price goes up from $175 per user per month to $195, and now includes 500,000 Flex Credits.”
Salesforce
Slack
It gets slower almost every Day. We are on slack since 2015 and have seen the degeneration of the product. Since they are Salesforce things got worse.
Workday
Impossible to remember where things are. Terrible ergonomy dating from Soviet Era. Slow!
LastPass
Multiple databreaches over many years eroding my trust. Denied having data breaches until data was leaked and vaults were cracked. Company purchased by a VC.
lumos
UI is awful, over complicated wrapper for Entra, written by people with no actual IAM or administration experience, overprivileged garbage.
Teams that built their own
Pieter Levels runs sites with 20,000 paying customers on about $300 a month after Claude Code found about $34,000 a month in cuts. Here is each line item.
Simon Høiberg moved 4 SaaS products off AWS to 3 rented Hetzner servers. The bill fell from close to $8,000 a month to around $300, about $92,400 a year.
Monthly research
October 2026· Final edition
268
AI-native alternatives and builders listed, replacing 203 tools
Most new alternatives
Read the October 2026 report