Your SaaS line item grew 40%.
Your revenue didn't.
It's your second-largest operating expense — and your CFO hasn't re-shopped the contracts since 2021. We run a free 30-minute stack review, identify the spend that doesn't pay back at your scale, and rebuild it on enterprise-direct billing. We rebuild it. We run it. You own the code. No audit fee. No 6-month engagement. Just the math.
220-person professional services firm
~$760K already paid in stack bloat (typical 30-month tenure on top 6 SaaS lines before review).
Free. 30 minutes. No deck. Just numbers.
A senior engineer and a partner walk through your top 6 SaaS lines, total annual contract value, renewal calendar, and where wrapper margin and stack bloat are hiding. You walk away with a 1-page CFO memo you can take to your next budget meeting — even if you never hire us further.
- → Top 6 SaaS lines mapped against direct-billing equivalents
- → Contract calendar · renewal pressure points · auto-renewal traps
- → Indicative 3-year forward TCO at current pace vs. rebuild
- → Seat-license utilisation map · duplicate-tool flag
- → 1-page CFO memo · ready for the next budget meeting
Anonymise the PDF if you prefer. We'll come back with a written read in 3 business days.
Five phases. Three months end-to-end.
From the free 30-min review to a managed stack running on direct billing. No surprises, no scope creep, no hourly billing. ISO 9001:2015 change-management discipline at every gate.
Four ways established stacks bleed.
We see the same four patterns at every $50M+ revenue company we audit. Each one alone is recoverable. Together, they're 30–60% of your annual SaaS spend.
Auto-renewals on stale terms
Salesforce, Mailchimp, Zendesk, HubSpot — rates set in 2021 still on auto-renew. Average annual price hike: 12–18%. Most mid-market firms haven't re-negotiated since onboarding. The vendor counts on you not noticing.
Seat over-licensing
120 Salesforce licenses paid for. 47 active users in the last 90 days. Your CRO doesn't know. Same story for Zoom, Atlassian, Adobe, Slack, GitHub. Mid-market average: 30–40% over-licensed across the top 5 tools.
Duplicate / overlapping tools
Mailchimp + Klaviyo + HubSpot Marketing — paid in parallel because procurement happened in different years and different teams. Same with Confluence + Notion + SharePoint, Zendesk + Intercom + Crisp, Asana + Monday + ClickUp. Nobody owns the consolidation.
Wrapper margin you didn't know you were paying
Harvey AI for legal drafting wraps GPT-4. Spellbook wraps Claude. Klaviyo wraps AWS SES. Cloudinary wraps S3 + CloudFront. You pay 5–10× the underlying platform cost — for a UI you could rebuild on direct billing in 4–6 weeks.
All four patterns above are reclaimable without changing how your team works day-to-day. The Optimization Roadmap quantifies each line on your specific stack.
Where this works.
Six industries where we see the bloat patterns most clearly. Each one has a typical stack signature, a typical contract calendar, and a typical reclaim profile. Your specific math comes out of the free Stack Review.
Professional services
Document automation, time tracking, client portals, AI drafting tools. The Harvey/Spellbook generation of "AI for [profession]" tools is a pure wrapper category.
Manufacturing & distribution
Salesforce + heavy ERP add-ons + custom CPQ + duplicated marketing tools. Often 10+ years on the same primary CRM with stacked add-ons.
Healthcare practice groups
EHR add-ons, patient comms (text/email), portal builders, AI scribing wrappers. HIPAA-compliant equivalents exist for nearly every wrapper.
Insurance & financial services
CRM stack (Redtail, Wealthbox), client portals, AI meeting tools (Jump, Zocks). Compliance often locks in vendors longer than necessary.
PE portfolio companies
Operating partners hunting margin across 10–25 portfolio cos. One Stack Review playbook applied to each portfolio company is typically a $1–4M annual saving aggregated.
Mid-market retail & D2C
Klaviyo + Cloudinary + Algolia + Yotpo + Gorgias. The classic D2C stack at $50M+ revenue is mostly wrapper margin over AWS primitives.
Three steps. Free to start.
Most engagements start at Phase 1 (free) and decide there whether the math justifies Phase 2. About 60% of free reviews turn into paid Roadmaps. About 75% of Roadmaps turn into Managed Upstream contracts.
Stack Review
- Top 6 SaaS lines mapped vs. direct-billing
- Renewal calendar · auto-renewal traps
- Indicative 3-yr reclaim range
- 1-page CFO memo
- NDA on request
Optimization Roadmap
- Full SaaS spend map (every line)
- Contract renegotiation playbook
- Rebuild scope + fixed quote
- Change-management plan
- 3-yr forward TCO model
- Procurement-ready bundle (MSA · SOW · DPA · insurance)
Managed Upstream
- We rebuild, we run, you own
- Hosting + monitoring + updates
- 24h business-day SLA · 1h critical SLA
- Quarterly business review
- Dedicated senior engineer + partner
- Cancel any time · take the code
Pricing is the same regardless of where you start. Skip phases if it makes sense (e.g. PE operating partners with portfolio data often go straight to Phase 2).
Pick your scale. See the numbers.
Three indicative profiles based on the bloat patterns above and public SaaS rate cards. Click a tile to see its 3-year math. Your specific numbers come out of the free Stack Review.
Figures derived from public wrapper-vs-direct rate cards and team-size norms. These are illustrative, not promises. The Stack Review produces numbers specific to your stack.
Why our number is below your current burn.
A $14K rebuild in 2–3 weeks, next to an $80K agency quote and a 6-month internal build, looks impossible. It isn't. Three things compound.
AI raises the floor on consistency.
Senior engineers (12+ years) using AI as a force multiplier — not the primary author. AI doesn't get tired at 2am, doesn't skip the boring tests, doesn't drift from the design system. Same patterns across every codebase. Same code-review standard. You get fewer bugs and predictable architecture — not faster slop.
The patterns are already shipped.
250+ products delivered across 15 years. Your Klaviyo replacement isn't being invented — we've shipped 9 of them. Your Datadog self-host isn't a research project — it's a deploy script we've run before. Domain knowledge is a sunk cost we already paid. The productivity dividend is yours.
Recapture isn't from our margin.
It's from the SaaS layer above us. AWS · Anthropic · OpenAI · Stripe · Twilio · Postmark — billed direct to your accounts, not ours. You keep the wrapper margin the SaaS vendor used to keep. We don't take a cut of infrastructure spend. Ever.
No offshore juniors · no LLM-only output · no hidden hourly rates that 3× after engagement. The senior engineer reviewing your PRs is the same one who scoped your build.
Who this is for. And who it isn't.
You're a no-brainer fit if…
- You're $10M–$500M revenue, 50–500 people
- You spend $100K+/yr on SaaS across top 5 lines
- Most contracts have been on auto-renew for 2+ years
- Procurement is CFO / COO / VP Operations-led
- You want a managed service, not "code thrown over the wall"
- You operate in US / UK / Australia / NZ
This isn't for you if…
- Your total SaaS spend is under $100K/yr — math won't pay back
- You're a tech startup pre-Series A — see the SaaS stack replacement page instead
- You don't have budget authority in the room
- You want code-only handoff, not a managed service
- Your stack is mostly industry-mandated (e.g. specific compliance vendors)
- You want to negotiate harder with current vendors — Vendr / Tropic do that
Why Allied BizTech — and not a system integrator?
A fair question. Big SIs (Accenture, Deloitte Digital, Cognizant) will run a procurement audit and recommend "consolidation". What they won't do is rebuild the categories where the wrapper margin is biggest, then run them as a managed service at fixed monthly cost. We do that. Four reasons it works.
ISO 9001:2015 + change-management discipline.
Not a 3-person dev shop. Allied BizTech has been delivering enterprise software for 15+ years under documented quality processes. The Optimization Roadmap deliverable is procurement-ready — MSA, SOW, DPA, insurance. Your legal team won't have to re-paper anything.
We rebuild AND run it.
SIs hand you code. Boutique shops hand you code. Allied BizTech is the only one in your shortlist that operates the rebuild as a managed service — same engineers who built it, dedicated partner, fixed monthly fee. No "find a vendor to maintain it" problem 6 months in.
Established direct-billing relationships.
Established accounts and direct working relationships with AWS · OpenAI · Anthropic · Stripe · Postmark · Cloudflare · Twilio. Your build deploys on enterprise-tier billing day one — terms a fresh agency would need 12+ months to access. That's most of the wrapper margin you're recapturing.
You can leave any time. With everything.
Code in your GitHub from day one. Infrastructure deployed via Docker — same images redeploy to your AWS, GCP, Azure, or anywhere. 90-day off-ramp clause in the Managed Upstream contract. The lock-in question gets answered before it's asked.
"What about…"
Five questions we get on every Stack Review. Honest answers below.
Won't owning the code create a maintenance burden?▾
What if Allied BizTech goes away?▾
How is this different from Vendr or Tropic (SaaS procurement)?▾
What about change management — won't my team revolt?▾
What about compliance — HIPAA, SOC 2, ISO?▾
How do you compare to a custom build with a freelancer / boutique?▾
What's the typical engagement timeline?▾
Looking for Salesforce alternative for mid-market · SaaS spend rationalisation · SaaS portfolio audit · vendor consolidation playbook · Harvey AI alternative · Mailchimp alternative for established companies · Klaviyo alternative mid-market · SaaS contract auto-renewal audit · seat licence optimisation · PE portfolio SaaS optimization · Vendr alternative · enterprise direct billing · build vs buy SaaS · EBITDA improvement SaaS ? We run a free 30-min review on your specific stack.
Stop renting. Start owning.
Three steps: free 30-min review → 4-week optimization roadmap → managed rebuild. No fee to start. No 6-month engagement to commit to a number.
Free Stack Review · 1-page CFO memo in 3 days · Indicative Y1 saving $50K – $560K across our typical engagement scales · The numbers are one-sided.
15+ years · ISO 9001:2015 · 250+ clients · MSA · SOW · DPA · insurance ready · honest about what's worth rebuilding — and what isn't.