A report from The Information has landed a spotlight on a trend that business owners should pay attention to: small and mid-sized companies are walking away from established CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot, replacing them with custom applications built using Claude Code and tools like Replit and Lovable, and cutting software costs by 40 to 80 percent in the process.

Reporter Laura Bratton documented five companies, all with between 20 and 70 staff, that cancelled major SaaS contracts over the past six months. Their motivation was simple. They were paying for platforms loaded with features they never used, and AI made it possible to build something that fit their actual workflow at a fraction of the cost.

What the Numbers Actually Look Like

The examples are specific enough to take seriously.

Greenleaf Management, an Atlanta-based real estate investment manager with around 55 employees, replaced Salesforce’s CRM with a custom application built through Replit and Claude Code. The custom app costs approximately $300 a month to maintain. The Salesforce contract it replaced cost around $100,000 a year. That is a 96 percent reduction in CRM spend.

The Seattle Seawolves, a 70-person professional rugby organisation, went further. They used Claude Code to rebuild both their Salesforce CRM and their AXS ticketing system over four months. The result: software costs dropped by around $100,000, and revenue is up 25 percent since the start of the season.

These are not hypothetical savings. They are documented outcomes from organisations that moved from off-the-shelf software to purpose-built tools designed around their specific operations.

It Is Not Just Small Companies

The same dynamic is emerging at enterprise scale. Sanofi, the French pharmaceutical company with around 75,000 employees, is reportedly cutting 80 percent of its ServiceNow usage by routing work through AI agents built with Claude Code and Cursor. The projected savings: at least $10 million annually.

The pattern is consistent. Organisations that understand their own workflows well enough to describe them clearly can now build software that does exactly what they need, without paying for everything they do not.

The Broader Shift Gartner Is Tracking

Gartner put a number on the structural risk to legacy SaaS in a report published July 1, 2026. The firm found that $234 billion in enterprise application software spending is exposed to what they called “agentic arbitrage” by 2030, roughly 20 percent of all enterprise SaaS spend. Their term for the wider trend: the SaaSpocalypse.

The mechanism is straightforward. When AI agents can complete tasks across multiple systems without users needing to interact with a traditional software interface, the value proposition of software built around user experience starts to erode. Businesses stop paying for seats in tools that nobody opens anymore.

What This Means for Business Owners

If you are running a business on Salesforce, HubSpot, ServiceNow, or any other platform where the licensing cost feels disproportionate to the value you are actually getting, the calculus has changed.

A year ago, the alternative to buying off-the-shelf software was either hiring developers at significant cost, building something slow and fragile, or going without. That is no longer the case. Teams that understand their own processes can now describe what they need in plain language and have a working system built and maintained for a fraction of what they were spending on SaaS licenses.

The questions worth asking your team: Which features in your current software stack does your team actually use? What would a tool designed specifically for your workflow look like? How much are you paying for everything else?

The companies walking away from Salesforce are not doing it because they dislike software. They are doing it because they found a better fit for less money, and AI made the switch practical for the first time.

What This Means for EDNA

Enterprise DNA’s Omni Apps service is built precisely for this moment. Custom AI-powered applications designed around your actual operations, built without the overhead of a traditional development project. If your business is sitting on SaaS contracts that no longer fit what you need, it is worth exploring what a purpose-built alternative could look like.

Talk to the Omni Apps team about replacing software that does not serve you