the SaaS model is quietly falling apart for small businesses and nobody in tech wants to admit it

I run a 12 person company and I just did our annual software audit and the number genuinely startled me so I want to see if other business owners are experiencing the same thing.

We are paying for 23 separate software subscriptions right now, everything from accounting to project management to CRM to email marketing to analytics to internal communication to file storage to scheduling to customer support to payroll, and the total monthly spend across all of them is $4,100 which is almost $50,000 a year on software for a 12 person company.

five years ago that number was about $1,200/month for roughly the same functionality

the thing that's happening is every tool is creeping their prices up 15 to 20% annually while simultaneously moving features that used to be included into higher tier plans, stuff that was in the basic plan two years ago is now "premium" and the basic plan has been hollowed out to the point where it barely does anything useful

but the part that really gets me is the tool sprawl problem, every category of software has been sliced thinner and thinner so you need more subscriptions to cover what one or two tools used to handle, we have separate tools for email finding and email sending and email warmup and CRM and analytics when five years ago your CRM just did all of that, there are newer platforms trying to reconsolidate like hubspot cramming everything into one suite or smaller ones like instantly and fuseai trying to merge the sales stack back together but the overall trend in SaaS is still toward fragmentation because every VC-backed startup needs its own category to raise money in

I've started to wonder if the SaaS model as it exists today is fundamentally misaligned with the interests of small businesses, we're the ones paying for all these seats and subscriptions and annual increases and the value we're getting hasn't increased proportionally at all, the software isn't 3x better than it was when it cost a third of the price

I know some people are going to say "just use fewer tools" but the reality is these tools don't talk to each other cleanly so you end up needing middleware like zapier to connect them which is ANOTHER subscription and the whole thing becomes this fragile web of integrations that breaks every time one platform updates their API

is anyone else feeling like the SaaS tax on small business is getting out of control or is it just us, I'm genuinely curious what other business owners are paying monthly for software and whether you think the value matches the cost