I worked in SaaS. Here is why I build software you own instead.

I spent years working in SaaS, the software you subscribe to by the month. Its greatest benefit is also where it goes wrong. Software lets a business grow without hiring for every new task, and it gives people hours back. The part that never makes it onto the sales deck is the cost: for a mid-size company, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, with a 5% increase at every renewal, for a product that is mediocre within three years.

If you have ever sat on the buying side, you know the pattern. The company makes money, locks you in, then gets lazy. It stops improving the product and keeps raising the price. The tool your team uses every day gets a little less intuitive each year, and you keep paying because moving would hurt more.

So why not own it?

That was the thought I could not shake. Why not build a business software it owns? Built around its problems instead of the average of a thousand customers. Paid for once. No license fee and no yearly increase. And when the business wants a new feature, we build it, instead of everyone settling for a subscription that drifts further from how they actually work.

That is the whole idea behind Prodigy. You pay for the build. The software and your data are yours. If you want us to host it, watch it and keep improving it, that is a month-to-month care plan you can cancel, which is a different thing from a license you are stuck with.

How a finance person ended up writing software

I did not know how to code when I had that thought. I knew two things: finance, and how to get real work out of large language models. So I learned a little every day and built tools for myself first. A trip planner. An analyzer for my own finances. Then I built the first real piece of software for my company: a tool that connected three data sources that had never spoken to each other.

The result was not what I expected. It answered questions we had never thought to ask. When data that lived in three separate places lands on one screen, the questions change. You stop asking "what is the number" and start asking "why is it different here".

That is what I want for the businesses we work with. Software that fits the way they run, that they own outright, and that gets better because they asked for it, not because a renewal came due.