Most companies don’t have a software problem. They have a strategy problem.
Right now, the math on how to fix it has shifted in ways that most leadership teams haven’t fully realized. This year marks what some are calling “peak martech:” a staggering 55,000 tools on the market. Yet, most teams are paying for a handful of subscriptions they don’t fully use, wired together with digital duct tape, quietly bending their operations to fit software that was never built for them.
THE BOX OF SHAME
1905 New Media’s own print shop, Thomson Printing, used to keep a cardboard box next to the main desk. Inside sat months of paper orders waiting to be invoiced.
The print shop had been running on paper since the 1970s. When 1905 New Media went looking for an off-the-shelf print management system that could also integrate with QuickBooks, Slack, client websites and remote order management, there wasn’t one.
Sometimes the right answer isn’t another subscription. Sometimes it’s a build. The internal tool that emerged from that decision is now the operational backbone of the print shop. The box of shame is gone.
THE COST OF SAAS
At our May 2026 Marketing Disrupted event, led by Head of Technology JP Revel, the central argument wasn’t that SaaS is inherently bad. It’s that most organizations default to it without doing the math.
The visible cost is the monthly bill. The less visible costs stack up differently.
- Spaghetti SaaS: When tools are wired together poorly — Zapier as the duct tape, double entry as the backup — you get broken integrations, vendor pricing creep and institutional knowledge that walks out the door the day the tool’s admin does.
- Operational Conformity: SaaS shapes your operations. You accept the features you’re given and bend your workflows to fit. Consequently, your processes start to look like every other company using the same tools. When everyone runs on the same stack, no one has an edge.
Some SaaS makes sense forever, such as accounting, email, calendars and tools with a network effect you can’t replicate (Slack, Zoom, LinkedIn). The critical question to ask is: Are you renting software that could be optimized to do something your competitors can’t match?
THE BUILD EQUATION HAS CHANGED
For the last two decades, building custom software was the slow, expensive option. A project that might cost $400,000 and six months of a dev team’s time in 2022 can now be completed in a fraction of that window. A single AI-assisted developer can cover ground that used to require an entire engineering department.
1905 New Media uses the BBMI Framework to evaluate technology decisions:
- Build
- Buy
- Modernize
- Integrate
For a long time, Build sat at the bottom of that list on pure economics. Today, if you have a strategic need and stable requirements, building is back in the running in a way it hasn’t been before. Our print shop’s internal tool was built at an estimated 50% faster and cheaper than it would have been two years ago.
ENTER THE “DARK FACTORY” PIPELINE
To understand why this math has collapsed, look at the “dark factory” model. Drawn from fully automated EV manufacturing facilities, these are environments where robots build cars in buildings without lights, no humans and no HVAC.
Applied to software, this means an automated pipeline that moves a new feature from initial requirements through QA testing and deployment with minimal human hand-holding. Because AI handles the heavy lifting of the code pipeline, the speed of delivery has skyrocketed while the cost has bottomed out.
START WITH WHAT YOU’VE OUTGROWN
The practical takeaway isn’t to go out and cancel your subscriptions. It’s to identify with your team the one tool you’ve completely outgrown.
Find the place where you’ve built manual workarounds to make off-the-shelf software fit a process it wasn’t designed for. That workaround is your signal. From there, the path is straightforward:
- Use available AI tools, such as Claude, ChatGPT, Lovable and Replit, to build a working prototype.
- Get it in front of users and get feedback.
- Bring the prototype and feedback to a developer who knows how to leverage AI-assisted coding tools to turn it into a secure, production-grade reality.
The point isn’t to suddenly become a software company. The point is to stop letting cookie-cutter software decide what your company can do.
THE 18-MONTH HORIZON
We are entering a window where software is no longer a fixed constraint. Organizations that make the strategic shift from renter to builder over the next 18 months will look unrecognizable compared to their competitors.
They will own their processes, protect their margins and move at a velocity that rigid SaaS platforms simply can’t support.
It’s time to look closely at your operational stack. Identify your own “box of shame,” stop paying for workarounds and start building your edge. Let 1905 New Media help you get there — contact us today to get started.
