For 20 years, purchasing enterprise software meant accepting a vendor’s feature set, paying per seat, and hiring an expert to manage the platform. For small businesses, this model often meant paying for features they never used. AI coding tools are changing that calculation.
The Information reports that five startups and small businesses with staffs ranging from 20 to 70 people have ended their contracts with Salesforce and HubSpot in the past six months in favor of applications built in-house using AI tools from Anthropic, Lovable, and Replit. Businesses have reduced software costs by 40% to 80%.
Research and advisory firm Gartner found that by 2030, $234 billion of enterprise application software spending will be exposed to agent arbitrage. This represents approximately 20% of all enterprise SaaS spending. “Agentic AI changes the economics of software,” said George Blocklehurst, managing vice president at Gartner, in a July 1 press release.
Retool, a low-code platform for building custom in-house tools, found that 35% of enterprises have already replaced at least one SaaS tool with a custom-built alternative, and 78% plan to build additional tools this year.
The calculation changes when the annual software cost is $1,200 instead of $40,000.
Greenleaf Management, an Atlanta-based real estate investment manager with approximately 55 employees, replaced Salesforce with a custom application built using Replit and Claude Code. Maintenance costs are about $300 a month, saving about $100,000 a year, partner Dave Codrea told The Information. The new app also allowed Greenleaf to end its contracts with real estate software companies Entrata and Yardi.
Atonom, a 45-employee startup in Utah, made a similar decision, replacing a $40,000 Salesforce contract with a CRM from Lovable that was expected to cost $1,200 annually. “Nobody was leveraging Salesforce to its full potential,” Atonom Chief Revenue Officer Gabe Larsen told The Information. “I don’t know if I need all the bells and whistles that everyone knows about CRM.”
The Seattle Seawolves, a 70-man professional rugby organization, used Claude Code to replace both their Salesforce CRM and AXS ticketing systems in four months. Owner Adrian Balfour told The Information the club has cut software spending by about $100,000 and has seen a 25% increase in revenue since the start of the season in March.
This change is not limited to small businesses. Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company with about 75,000 employees, aims to reduce its ServiceNow usage by 80% and save at least $10 million annually by routing work through AI agents built with Claude Code and Cursor, The Information reported.
Vendors measure AI agents and rethink pricing
Enterprise software vendors aren’t staying silent. ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday have introduced controls that require external AI agents to go through pay-as-you-go integration layers to access customer data, PYMNTS reported.
Salesforce and ServiceNow are moving to outcome-based pricing, PYMNTS reported. According to Forbes, Salesforce’s AgentForce annual recurring revenue (ARR) increased 169% in one quarter.
Bobby Mukherjee, CEO of IT consulting firm Loka, told The Information that replacing SaaS platforms “takes engineering attention away from what actually differentiates the business.” Salesforce President Srini Thalapragada told investors that companies are “recognizing that, as much as they’re trying to do it themselves, the way to achieve enterprise reliability and security is not to give tone to the code.”
According to GuruFocus, ServiceNow reported a 97% renewal rate in the first quarter of 2026 as customers are expanding their footprint rather than leaving.
There are also structural cases for stays. What makes migrating from Salesforce and other SaaS providers difficult are the layers of customized workflows that companies continually add and update to track everything from product catalogs to pricing to customer commitments.
Enterprise SaaS platforms are also built to support compliance requirements, security infrastructure, and integration across dozens of systems that custom-built tools typically lack, says industry blog The SaaS CFO.
According to a report from Forbes, enterprise software spending is expected to increase by 15% to $1.4 trillion in 2026. Money doesn’t flow out of enterprise software. We’re moving towards different products at different price points.
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