The Case for Owning Your Critical Business Logic

What We Mean by "Owning" Your Systems

Ownership isn't about running your own data centre or rejecting all third-party software. It's about control over the things that matter most to how your business operates and competes.

When you own a system, you control four critical dimensions:

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  The data Where it lives, how it's structured, who can access it, and how it flows to other systems
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  The logic The rules that govern how your business operates, including edge cases specific to your situation
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  The roadmap What features get built and when, based on your priorities rather than the vendor's average customer
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  The exit The ability to change direction without starting over, losing history, or being held hostage during a transition

When you rent a system, someone else makes those decisions. Usually a product team optimising for their average customer, who isn't you. Their priorities become your constraints. Their roadmap becomes your ceiling. Their pricing becomes your cost of doing business.

Why This Matters More Than It Used To

Ten years ago, most business software was installed locally. You bought a licence, you got software, you owned it. The vendor couldn't change your workflow overnight, triple your costs at renewal, or decide that the feature you depend on belongs in a higher pricing tier.

Today, nearly everything is SaaS. That brings real benefits: automatic updates, no infrastructure management, pay-as-you-go pricing that matches your scale. But it also creates dependencies that compound over time:

For peripheral tools, these risks are manageable. Switching email clients or project management tools is disruptive but survivable. For your core operational systems, the systems that encode how your business actually works, these aren't just inconveniences. They're strategic vulnerabilities. This is why digital sovereignty has become such an important consideration for growing businesses.

When Vendors Pivot, Get Acquired, or Shut Down

The SaaS model depends on vendors staying in business, staying focused on your needs, and staying independent. History suggests none of these are guaranteed.

Consider what happens when a vendor you depend on gets acquired by a larger company. The acquiring company has its own product roadmap, its own technology stack, and its own strategic priorities. Your needs, as an existing customer of the acquired product, are rarely central to those priorities.

Private equity acquisitions follow a different but equally concerning pattern. The new owners focus on maximising short-term revenue. That means raising prices, reducing support costs, and cutting R&D. The product you chose for its innovation becomes a cash cow being milked until customers leave.

Even successful independent vendors pose risks. Products pivot to chase larger markets, leaving smaller customers behind. Enterprise features get prioritised over the functionality that made the tool useful for growing businesses. The vendor you chose when you were both small moves upmarket while you stay in place.

Real Consequences, Real Costs

When a vendor disruption hits, the costs go beyond the obvious migration expense:

When you own a system, vendor changes affect components you can replace. When you rent a system, vendor changes affect your entire operation.

The Data Portability Reality

Every SaaS vendor claims to support data export. The reality is more complicated. What you can export, how complete that export is, and how usable the exported data turns out to be varies enormously.

True data portability requires more than a CSV download button. It means being able to extract everything that matters in a format that's genuinely useful for migration or analysis.

What Complete Data Export Actually Requires

Testing Before You're Trapped

Before committing deeply to any SaaS system, test the export functionality with real data:

The time to discover export limitations is before you've invested years of business history in a system.

The Two Categories of Business Software

Not all software decisions carry equal weight. We find it helpful to divide business software into two categories with fundamentally different risk profiles.

Infrastructure You Rent

Commodity services where the vendor's expertise genuinely exceeds yours and where industry standards ensure portability:

• Email delivery and spam filtering: Postmark, SendGrid, Amazon SES. SMTP is a standard. Your emails can flow through any of them.
• Payment processing: Stripe, Braintree, Adyen. Card networks define the interfaces. Switching requires integration work, not data migration.
• Cloud hosting: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure. Infrastructure as code means your configuration is portable.
• Authentication: Auth0, Okta, Firebase Auth. Identity standards (OIDC, SAML) mean you're not locked to one provider.
• Analytics and monitoring: Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Datadog. Your metrics start fresh anyway. Historical data matters less than future measurement.

For these categories, renting makes sense. The vendors have invested heavily in solving hard problems. You benefit from their scale and expertise. Standards ensure you can switch if needed.

Operations You Own

Systems that encode how your specific business works, not generic functionality but your particular approach to serving customers:

• How you manage customer relationships: Not just contact storage, but how you nurture, communicate, and track the full lifecycle
• How you track and fulfil orders: Your specific workflow from enquiry to delivery, with your edge cases and exceptions
• How you deliver services and manage projects: The stages, handoffs, and quality gates that define your methodology
• How you onboard clients and team members: The steps that ensure consistency and capture institutional knowledge
• How you make decisions and report on performance: The metrics, dashboards, and alerts that drive your business

These systems define your operations. They encode your competitive advantage. Renting them means renting your business model from a vendor who doesn't understand it. For many businesses, this realisation comes when spreadsheets break and they find themselves trapped between inadequate tools and platforms that don't fit.

Signs You're Renting What You Should Own

You might have crossed from sensible renting into problematic dependency if several of the following apply to a core system:

None of these are automatically deal-breakers for peripheral tools. But if several apply to a core system, the system that manages customers or orders or projects or revenue, you've got a strategic dependency that deserves serious attention.

A Framework for Evaluating Rent vs Own Decisions

Every system decision involves trade-offs. The goal isn't to own everything or rent everything, but to make deliberate choices about where ownership creates strategic value.

The Evaluation Criteria

For each significant system, consider these five dimensions:

The Decision Matrix

Plotting systems against these criteria reveals where ownership matters most:

The Economics of Ownership Over Time

Ownership costs more upfront. You're paying for development, hosting, and maintenance instead of a monthly subscription. But the economics often favour ownership over a realistic time horizon.

The Five-Year View

Consider a typical mid-market SaaS subscription for a core operational system:

At first glance, SaaS appears cheaper. But this comparison misses crucial factors.

The Ten-Year View

Extending the analysis reveals a different picture:

The Hidden Costs of Renting

SaaS pricing rarely captures the full cost of dependency:

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  Time spent on workarounds Staff hours wasted navigating limitations. Processes adapted to fit software instead of software adapted to fit processes.
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  Integration friction Developer time connecting systems through limited APIs. Brittle integrations that break with vendor updates.
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  Training costs Retraining team members when the vendor redesigns the interface or changes functionality.
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  Opportunity costs Better processes you can't implement. Competitive advantages you can't pursue. Speed you can't achieve.
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  Risk premium The potential cost of forced migration if the vendor gets acquired, pivots, or shuts down.

These costs are real but invisible. They don't show up on an invoice, so they're easy to ignore. But they compound just as surely as the subscription fees.

The Hybrid Approach: Own Core, Rent Periphery

The most effective strategy for most growing businesses isn't pure ownership or pure renting. It's a hybrid approach that owns what matters and rents what doesn't.

What the Hybrid Looks Like

This approach captures the benefits of both models. Your unique operational logic lives in systems you control completely. The commodity plumbing underneath uses best-in-breed services that handle hard infrastructure problems. This is the practical application of vertical integration for business software.

How Custom Systems Use Commodity Services

A well-designed custom system isn't an island. It uses commodity services for the infrastructure layer while maintaining ownership of the business logic layer:

If any commodity service changes terms or shuts down, you can swap it for an alternative. Your business logic remains intact. Your data stays yours. The transition is measured in days, not months.

What Ownership Actually Looks Like

Owning your core systems doesn't mean building everything from scratch. It means retaining control over what matters. Several models deliver genuine ownership:

The common thread is control. You can change, extend, or replace the system based on your needs, not a vendor's permissions.

Operational Implications of Each Approach

Ownership and renting create different operational realities. Understanding these implications helps set realistic expectations and plan appropriately.

Operating Rented Systems

Operating Owned Systems

Making the Transition

If you're currently renting systems you should own, the transition doesn't have to be dramatic. A phased approach manages risk while building toward strategic independence.

How We Think About This at IGC

We use a mix of owned and rented systems ourselves. The pattern reflects the principles in this guide.

The systems that define how we work, how we deliver value to clients, how we make decisions, are ours. The commodity infrastructure underneath is rented from vendors we trust, with the knowledge that we could switch if needed.

This isn't ideology. It's practical experience. We've seen what happens when vendors pivot, when prices triple, when acquisitions change product direction. We've helped clients migrate away from systems they'd become too dependent on. The pain of those transitions informed how we structure our own operations.

What You Get From Ownership

Strategic ownership of core systems delivers tangible benefits that compound over time:

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  Control over costs No surprise price increases or forced tier upgrades. Your costs are predictable and under your control.
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  Control over roadmap Build features when you need them, based on your priorities. No waiting for vendor backlogs.
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  Control over data Export, analyse, migrate without restrictions. Your data is truly yours.
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  Control over timing Change things on your schedule, not a vendor's update cycle.
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  Control over integration Connect systems however you need. No API limitations or rate limits.
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  An asset, not an expense Systems you own have value. They continue working indefinitely. Subscriptions are just rent.

The ultimate benefit is strategic independence. The freedom to evolve your operations based on what's best for your business, not what a vendor's product team decided to prioritise.

Further Reading

• GDPR Data Portability Right - ICO guidance on legal frameworks for data export rights
• Open Source Initiative: Licenses - Understanding open-source licensing for owned systems
• Cloud Security Alliance STAR Registry - Database for assessing vendor security practices