We had an app we’d been reference customers for — for years. Our case study was on their website. We got them several of the largest customers in B2B via our direct recommendation. We were evangelists. We were part of their success story.
Then last year they told us we had to pay another $20,000 a year to brand the app.
I.e., just to add a JPEG. Which we’d already done for 5+ years. It wasn’t even a new feature. It was literally just putting our logo in the app interface.
“Why?” we asked the new CRO, who had implemented the new fee in an ambush call.
“Because we need the revenue,” the CRO answered directly. “So I’m forcing you to pay it.”
That is the state of Software as a Service (SaaS) apps today and it's getting worse.
Slack just clamped down on access for third party apps. That doesn't sound that bad on the surface but let me tell you what it really means.
They want to stop you from linking your own data to ChatGPT or Claude or some service that uses AI to get better insights. Why?
Because they want to charge you to use their service in their sandbox. It's no coincidence that Slack's Business Plus service was announced just a few months after the data pipeline cut off.
This is outrageous. Your data is your most valuable asset and Slack wants to put a paywall on it. My response, get out of Slack as soon as possible.
This is a major issue for two reasons.
Your Data Is Your Advantage
For years we heard about Big Data. It didn't mean much to small businesses because we don't have that much data. Big data was for banks and huge companies. But that's not true anymore.
Even a 10 person company has a lot of meetings. Meetings with clients, customers, internal participants, vendors, etc. Every single one of those encounters has data in it. And if you start adding up 10, 20, 30 plus meeting a week, pretty soon you are looking at some serious data.
All that data has been largely dark until AI. Now you can store it and find insights in it.
Want to know what makes a customer churn? Review the data leading up to the decision. How's that salesperson doing? Look across all their interactions.
Once you play out all the scenarios, you start realizing the power. And you start realizing how damaging it is to allow a SaaS vendor to put a tollbooth in front of that data.
Adding insult to injury, SaaS vendors aren't just gating your data, they are also using the very tech that can free you to charge you more for nothing. Enter the AI add-on buttons, with a new $15/seat fee, that don't provide value. They are picking up pennies in front of the steam roller.
But that's just the beginning of the extraction machine.
The SaaS Extraction Machine
Lemkin demonstrates:
SaaS pricing is up 11.4% year-over-year—nearly 5X the 2.7% inflation rate. That's not inflation. That's price gouging with earnings-call language.
Salesforce gets 72% of its growth from price increases, not new customers or innovation. Think about that. Three-quarters of their growth comes from charging you more, not building things you actually want.
The federal government negotiated 90% discounts with major vendors. Ninety percent. That discount reveals exactly how much margin these companies have been sitting on while telling you prices must go up.
60% of vendors now mask price increases by bundling unwanted AI features. Adobe rebranded Creative Cloud to "Creative Cloud Pro," added AI features most users will never touch, and charged 17% more. You can't opt out.
The math is simple: Corporate IT budgets grow at 2.8% annually while SaaS vendors hike prices 9-25%. Something has to give.
What This Means for Your Business
You are now in a war with your vendors and unfortunately you aren't armed.
The solution to a more open Slack or CRM or ERP isn't really available yet.
Many entrepreneurs are working on solutions to this problem. OwnerRx is one of them but the calvary hasn't arrived yet. The good news is that it's on the way.
The Agentic AI Alternative
Soon you'll have products that offer integration across all your software and open data access as a default. These systems will be built from the ground up to capture all the data your company throws off and mine it for insights and ways to improve.
Think about all the lectures you've gotten about documenting and following standard processes. What if your system documented them for you, identified ways to make the processes better, and then just told people what to change as they were doing the work? That's coming soon.
Your Action Plan
Audit your SaaS stack
Which vendors have raised prices 15%+ in the past year?
Which tools have mandatory features you don't use?
Where are you locked in by contract vs. value?
Shorten commitments
No more signing 3 years contracts
You’ll pay a bit more for the flexibility but it’ll be worth it
Plan your transition
Start looking at your data architecture. Do you store docs and data in consistent and known places. Are files on people’s individual machines. Get that cleaned up
Scan the environment for new AI first solutions. Try to talk with colleagues who have adopted them early. Can they move the needle for you?
The Bottom Line
As Lemkin points out, traditional SaaS vendors are optimizing for the quarter and losing the decade. They're mining their customer base like a coal seam that will never run out.
You need to be ready to make the switch, experiment with new tools, and adopt what’s going to give you an advantage.
That’s it for this week,
Alan
P.S. If you are interested in being in the beta group for OwnerRx, sign up here. We are aiming for early February 2026.