Build Your Own Software and Cut SaaS Costs with AI

SaaS licensing is a silent tax on South African e-commerce and digital service businesses. It starts small—one tool for email, another for customer support, another for analytics—then turns into a monthly stack that’s harder to cancel than it is to justify.

Most companies get this wrong: they assume the only alternatives are “pay the license” or “build everything from scratch.” The reality is a third option has become practical in 2025—build the specific workflows you actually need, faster, with AI-assisted development, and keep paying for only the platforms that genuinely earn their keep.

This post is part of our series on how AI is powering e-commerce and digital services in South Africa. Here’s the stance I’m taking: if a tool is core to your margin (pricing, fulfilment, customer comms, fraud checks), you should seriously consider owning it—at least the parts that make you different.

Why licensing fees hit South African businesses harder

Licensing fees hurt more when your costs are in rands and your vendors price in dollars. Even when tools bill locally, many SaaS price models are pegged to global tiers that assume bigger average order values and higher margins than many South African operators have.

There are three patterns I see repeatedly in local e-commerce and digital services:

• Seat-based pricing punishes growth. The minute you add agents, merchandisers, or ops staff, your “software overhead” climbs.
• Feature bundling forces waste. You pay for capabilities you don’t use because the one feature you do need is locked behind an expensive tier.
• Vendor lock-in becomes operational risk. If pricing changes, integrations break, or the vendor sunsets a feature, your customer experience takes the hit.

This matters because many SA businesses are already balancing load shedding contingencies, delivery variability, and price-sensitive consumers. A bloated SaaS stack is one more thing squeezing margin.

Build vs buy isn’t the real decision (own vs rent is)

The real choice is whether the workflow that drives revenue should be owned or rented. “Build vs buy” makes it sound like you’re choosing between a huge engineering project and a credit card swipe. In practice, most companies can carve off just the pieces that create differentiation.

What you should own (usually)

Own the processes where your competitive advantage lives:

• Pricing rules and promo logic (especially if you do bundles, clearance, dynamic discounts)
• Customer segmentation and targeting (how you decide who gets which offer)
• Order orchestration across warehouse/store/dropship combinations
• Returns triage (what gets refunded, inspected, resold, or written off)
• Service workflows for high-value customers or regulated industries

If you’re paying a license mainly to get your unique process executed, you’re renting your differentiation.

What you should rent (happily)

Rent the stuff that’s commodity and compliance-heavy:

• Payments infrastructure
• Fraud tooling (unless you’re a payments business)
• Base CRM/contact storage
• Commodity accounting
• Cloud hosting primitives

A clean approach is: rent the infrastructure, own the logic.

How AI makes custom software affordable (and faster)

AI reduces the cost of building custom software by speeding up analysis, prototyping, and test coverage. It doesn’t remove the need for experienced engineers, but it changes the economics—especially for small-to-mid teams.

Here’s where AI genuinely helps (without magical thinking):

AI-assisted product discovery: build the right thing first

Most licensing pain comes from misfit: teams buy a tool, then bend processes around it. AI can help you map what’s actually happening:

• Summarise support tickets to identify the top 10 failure points in your customer journey
• Cluster “reason for return” text into categories you can act on
• Extract recurring internal requests (“Can we export this report weekly?”) and rank by frequency

That’s your build roadmap—based on evidence, not opinions.

AI-assisted development: faster scaffolding, fewer blank pages

For e-commerce and digital services, you often need standard building blocks: admin dashboards, role-based access, audit logs, webhooks, basic integrations. AI tools can accelerate:

• Boilerplate generation for internal tools
• API client scaffolding for third-party integrations
• Automated documentation drafts and endpoint descriptions

The point isn’t to “auto-code your business.” The point is to remove the slow parts that don’t create strategic value.

AI for testing and reliability: cheaper quality

In my experience, the hidden cost of “building” is not the initial build—it’s maintenance. AI can help teams ship safer software by:

• Generating unit test cases from existing code paths
• Proposing edge cases (currency rounding, address formats, partial refunds)
• Flagging risky changes by analysing diffs and dependencies

That directly protects revenue. A broken checkout for two hours in December is more expensive than a year of careful engineering.

Practical targets: what to build first to replace pricey licenses

Start with narrow, high-frequency workflows where a license charges you repeatedly for the same value. You want quick wins that prove the model and fund the next build.

1) Customer service macros + “next best action” console

If you’re paying per support seat, build a lightweight internal console that sits on top of your existing inbox.

What it can include:

• Order lookup + delivery status in one view
• Refund/return eligibility rules
• AI-suggested reply drafts in your brand voice (with approvals)
• Automatic tagging and routing (late delivery, damaged, missing item)

You still might keep a helpdesk platform, but you reduce dependency on its higher tiers.

2) Returns and refunds rules engine

Returns are where margin goes to die. A rules engine you own can enforce consistent policy and reduce agent discretion.

Typical rules:

• Auto-approve refunds under R300 for low-risk customers
• Route high-value items to inspection
• Trigger store credit offers for repeat returners
• Require photo evidence for certain categories

AI can support classification (reason codes, photo checks), but the policy should be yours.

3) Merchandising and promo tooling

If you run frequent promos, you’re often overpaying for enterprise features just to schedule discounts.

Build a small tool that:

• Manages promo calendars and exclusions
• Applies guardrails (minimum margin, stock thresholds)
• Simulates impact (expected units, expected margin) using your own data

Even a basic version can remove the need for expensive add-ons.

4) Content ops for product pages (with human approval)

For South African e-commerce, product catalog quality is still a competitive advantage. AI helps you create consistent listings faster:

• Generate titles, bullets, and attribute suggestions from supplier data
• Standardise sizing and material descriptions n- Translate or localise where needed

Keep humans in the loop. The goal is speed and consistency, not generic copy.

The numbers that matter: a simple build-vs-license model

If a license cost grows with seats, transactions, or revenue, your ROI case for building is easier. You don’t need a fancy spreadsheet to start—use a basic model and refine it.

Here’s a framework I’ve found useful:

1. Current annual license cost: (monthly fee × 12) + paid add-ons
2. Growth penalty: expected increase from new seats/volume over 12–24 months
3. Build cost (once-off): discovery + build + rollout
4. Run cost (annual): hosting + maintenance + small improvements
5. Risk cost: what a failure costs (downtime, refunds, reputational damage)

A common “good” target is a build that pays back in 12–18 months while also improving performance or customer experience.

Snippet-worthy rule: If you’re paying recurring fees for a workflow you execute thousands of times a month, you should at least price the cost of owning it.

Governance: how to build without creating a maintenance mess

The fastest way to regret custom software is to skip product discipline. AI makes building easier; it also makes shipping sloppy code easier. Treat internal tools as products.

Set the boundaries upfront

Define:

• Who owns the backlog (product owner, ops lead, or CTO)
• Which metrics define success (AHT, refund rate, conversion, time-to-publish)
• What “done” means (tests, audit logs, role permissions)

Use a modular approach

For South African e-commerce and digital services, modularity reduces risk:

• Keep customer data in one source of truth
• Expose capabilities via APIs
• Build thin UIs on top of stable services

This lets you replace parts without rewriting everything.

Don’t skip security and compliance basics

If you’re handling customer data, your baseline should include:

• Least-privilege access
• Audit trails for admin actions
• Encryption in transit and at rest
• Backup and restore drills
• Clear data retention rules

AI can help document and test these controls, but it can’t be accountable for them.

People also ask: “Can a small team really build this?”

Yes—if you pick the right scope. A small team can build targeted tools that remove the most painful licensing fees, especially when AI accelerates scaffolding and testing.

No—if you try to replace a full enterprise suite. The win comes from replacing the expensive slices you use daily, not every feature you might use someday.

A strong starting point is one workflow, one team, one metric. For example: “Reduce average refund handling time from 18 minutes to 8 minutes.” Then build toward that.

Where this fits in the bigger AI-in-commerce story

Across this series, one theme keeps showing up: AI works best when it’s connected to real operational workflows, not isolated as a chatbot experiment. Owning the right software makes that connection easier because your data, rules, and processes aren’t trapped behind someone else’s licensing tiers.

If you’re serious about scaling e-commerce or digital services in South Africa, you don’t need to reject SaaS. You need to be picky. Rent commodity platforms, but build (and own) the processes that protect margin and shape customer experience.

The next practical step: audit your top five licenses and ask, “If this vendor doubled prices in 6 months, what would we build first?” Your answer is probably the software you should start owning now.