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Andy Frank is our Founder and CEO. Since founding UDig, he has had the opportunity to build a business fueled by finding clients the right technology solutions to solve their business challenges.
The Bloated SaaS Era: Paying More for Less While Businesses Wait
By Andy Frank
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SaaS was supposed to make business faster, smarter, and more efficient. Instead, it’s become bloated, expensive, and painfully slow to change. The platforms we rely on—Salesforce, Workday, SAP, and others—haven’t truly innovated in years. Yet, they demand massive investments in re-implementation, process re-engineering, and data migration just to keep up.
It’s time to ask: Are we stuck in an outdated model? Can we break free? And what happens when AI, Cloud, and Automation rewrite the rules?
In this article, we will cover:
- The Great SaaS Lie: It’s Just a Data Model
- Generic SaaS = Generic Business Processes
- Klarna’s Bold Move: A Glimpse Into a Post-SaaS Future
- The Rip-and-Replace Tax
- Can We Unbundle?
- The Future: AI, Cloud, and Automation Will Break Big SaaS
- The Path Forward
The Great SaaS Lie: It’s Just a Data Model
At its core, SaaS is just a data model with a UI—but somehow, we’ve let it turn into a business-wide disruption event every few years.
- How many fields on your Account or Opportunity objects actually matter?
- How much of your CRM is unused, redundant, or misaligned with how your business actually operates?
- How often are we forced into unnecessary upgrades that offer little value?
Salesforce, for example, hasn’t significantly innovated in years—instead, it has focused on acquisitions and pricing increases while making minimal improvements to its core platform. The result? More complexity, more lock-in, and more money spent on things no one asked for.
Big SaaS companies don’t prioritize product improvement anymore. They prioritize revenue extraction—forcing companies into complex rip-and-replace cycles that stall business progress for years.
Generic SaaS = Generic Business Processes
One of the biggest issues with enterprise SaaS? It’s built to work across industries.
This means SaaS platforms don’t adopt best practices—they force everyone into generic, bloated processes that work “just well enough” across multiple industries.
The original thinking was: These processes must be better than ours. We should adopt them.
But here’s the reality: They’re not. They’re not designed with lean principles in mind. They add layers of unnecessary complexity to force-fit different industries into a single system. They create workarounds, inefficiencies, and frustration—because they were never designed to fit your business in the first place.
The result? Instead of simplifying your operations, Big SaaS forces you to bend your business to fit their software—often at the cost of agility, efficiency, and speed.
Klarna’s Bold Move: A Glimpse Into a Post-SaaS Future
While most companies accept the rip-and-replace tax of Big SaaS, Klarna is proving that there’s another way.
Klarna’s CEO, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, recently announced the company is shutting down Salesforce and Workday as part of an internal shift toward AI-powered solutions.
“We just shut down Salesforce. Within a few weeks, we will shut down Workday. We are shutting down a lot of our SaaS providers, as we are able to consolidate.”
Klarna is using AI to replace legacy SaaS, leveraging an AI assistant named Kiki to handle customer service, internal workflows, and decision-making processes. The goal? More agility, lower costs, and fewer bloated tools slowing the business down.
Not surprisingly, this has rattled the SaaS industry. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff publicly questioned how Klarna is handling governance and compliance without traditional platforms:
“I’ve had several of my friends reach out to him because he hasn’t said where he’s managing his data…how he is managing and sharing this information? How is he achieving compliance, governance of his company?”
But Benioff’s skepticism misses the point. Klarna isn’t just swapping one system for another—it’s questioning whether these systems are necessary at all.
This move challenges the status quo: Why should companies continue using bloated, outdated SaaS platforms when AI and automation can streamline their entire tech stack?
The Rip-and-Replace Tax
Every 5-7 years, businesses are told they need to replatform—not because they want to, but because their current SaaS provider forces them to. This means:
- Years of process re-engineering. What worked before suddenly needs to be “reimagined” for a new system.
- Massive data migration projects. Moving and cleaning up decades of data is a nightmare—often with no tangible business benefit.
- Report rebuilding and dashboard rework. The same insights, just in a new, shinier (and slower) UI.
- A business that’s effectively on pause. Teams are busy implementing something nobody wants, instead of focusing on growth.
This never-ending cycle of disruption benefits one party: the SaaS provider. Meanwhile, businesses waste time and money just to stay in place.
Klarna’s approach proves that escaping this cycle is possible—but it requires breaking free from the assumption that Big SaaS is the only way.
Can We Unbundle?
Big SaaS sells the dream of an all-in-one platform—but in reality, most companies use only a fraction of what they pay for.
This bundling problem is a lot like cable TV vs. streaming. We thought unbundling would give us better choices. Instead, we now pay more for things we don’t use—a collection of disconnected, mediocre experiences.
But what if we could actually unbundle SaaS?
- Best-of-breed solutions could replace bloated, one-size-fits-all platforms.
- Composable architectures (powered by cloud and APIs) could let businesses build exactly what they need—nothing more, nothing less.
- AI-driven automation could replace complex manual processes, reducing reliance on massive SaaS ecosystems.
The problem? Big SaaS doesn’t want this. Their entire model is based on lock-in, bundling, and forced upgrades.
The Future: AI, Cloud, and Automation Will Break Big SaaS
SaaS can’t stay bloated forever. The convergence of AI, Cloud, and Automation is creating a new environment—one where:
- AI replaces many of the redundant workflows baked into legacy SaaS.
- Cloud-native, API-first architectures remove the need for massive monolithic platforms.
- Automation reduces complexity, eliminating the need for constant “retraining” and “replatforming.”
The key question: Will SaaS giants adapt, or will they become the next generation of legacy software that businesses are desperate to escape?
Klarna’s decision to ditch Salesforce and Workday signals that the end of bloated SaaS might be closer than we think. The companies that embrace AI, unbundle their tech stacks, and move fast will gain a competitive advantage—while those stuck in rip-and-replace cycles will be left behind.
The Path Forward
- Stop accepting forced migrations. Demand real innovation, not just UI refreshes.
- Evaluate unbundling opportunities. Where can you replace all-in-one platforms with best-in-class solutions?
- Leverage AI and automation. Look for opportunities to reduce reliance on bloated, inefficient SaaS.
Klarna is proving that escaping Big SaaS is possible—but the real question is: Who will be next?