A client's SaaS vendor renewal came in at three times the price. They forwarded it to me like it was a crime scene photo. They wanted a cheaper vendor. I wanted to know why they needed one at all.
CMS platform, bolted onto their stack for one job: managing about four content types across a marketing site and a docs portal. Four. I've seen personal blogs with more content types than this production “enterprise solution”. The vendor was charging like they were hosting NASA.
I spent four days asking around, mapping what they actually used against what they were paying for. They'd been paying for a whole tier of features nobody on the team even knew existed. Real-time collaborative editing for three people who update the docs portal twice a year, which gets maybe eleven visitors a month, three of whom are bots.
Nobody had looked at this invoice in two years. It just quietly renewed itself like a gym membership everyone forgot to cancel.
We rebuilt the core on Drupal 11. Content types mapped one-to-one, all four of them, painstakingly. Migrated everything by hand — it didn't even need a script. Three weeks. Editors kept every workflow. Nobody noticed the swap except the finance team.
New annual cost: basically the hosting bill. The client told me the vendor called back twice to “revisit the pricing conversation”.
Check what your SaaS actually does before it turns into a very expensive four-field content editor. Sometimes the upgrade isn't a new vendor. It's owning the thing outright.