Keep what works. Own what matters.
AaSS (Agent as Software Solution) is not a war on SaaS. Renting and owning are two poles, and a healthy business lives between them.
Two fair columns
Renting is the right choice
- Problems everybody shares (email, payroll, video calls): shared cost wins.
- When a law or a customer needs a certified vendor (SOC 2, ISO 27001): rent from one.
- When the network is the product: marketplaces, social platforms, and our own video channel.
- When you don’t want to own anything: owning means keeping, and keeping is work.
- When you don’t know your process yet: rent, learn, then own what matters.
Owning is the right choice
- The process is how you’re different from everyone else.
- Your tools don’t talk to each other, and middlemen glue them together.
- You pay for many features you never use.
- Support takes days, and your roadmap is someone else’s.
- If the vendor vanished tomorrow, you’d stop working.
Movement goes both ways. You can go from SaaS to AaSS, and back again. If a business grows into needing the big system, that’s fine. Nothing here stops it.
Renting software isn’t going away, and it shouldn’t. The world needs both: up and down, left and right. Renting and owning are meant to live side by side.
The method, in four steps
Mirror
Own a copy of your data, in a database you control, fed from the tools you rent.
It replaces nothing and risks nothing, and your agent can already answer questions across all your tools at once.
Fill the gaps
Build the small tools no app does.
The copy-paste between two systems, the spreadsheet only one person understands, the report nobody sells.
Replace, one tool at a time
Only when owning pays: in money, in time, or in being stuck.
Keep what works
Whatever still earns its rent, keep renting.
Movement goes both ways. You can go from SaaS to AaSS, and back again.
Check one tool
One tool at a time. Six questions, and a lean, not a verdict. It prints as a plain list, too.