U.S. small businesses are setting off a wave of Salesforce unsubscriptions, using AI to build self-developed software to drastically reduce costs.

Dozens of small businesses in the U.S. are building custom apps using AI coding tools such as Anthropic and Replit to replace Salesforce, saving tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, with maintenance costs amounting to only a few hundred dollars. Large enterprises like Sanofi are also testing the waters, but facing migration resistance. SaaS giants defend themselves by citing stable renewal rates, while the market fears that advancing AI capabilities will erode their growth logic.

A number of small enterprises in the U.S. are leveraging AI coding tools to ditch traditional enterprise software like Salesforce, saving tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year, further fueling investors' concerns over the long-term growth logic of the SaaS industry.

According to a recent report from The Information, over the past six months, at least five startups and small companies with 20 to 70 employees have terminated their contracts with Salesforce or HubSpot, and instead used AI tools such as Anthropic, Lovable, and Replit to develop custom alternative applications, achieving significant cost reductions. This trend, while currently limited to small customer segments, has sparked market doubts over whether traditional enterprise software vendors can sustain the high-growth momentum they have maintained for more than a decade.

Enterprise software giants including Salesforce and ServiceNow are taking a defensive stance, emphasizing on one hand that customer renewal rates remain robust, and on the other hand, striving to strengthen their positioning as the "indispensable middle layer" between enterprises and large AI models.

However, AI-native companies represented by Anthropic and Palantir have seen their growth rates significantly outpace those of the aforementioned traditional software vendors, and market discussions about "SaaSpocalypse" have continued to heat up accordingly.

01

Small Business "Exodus" Cases: Cutting Million-Dollar Costs Down to the Thousand-Dollar Level

Multiple specific cases reveal the scale and speed of this trend.

Greenleaf Management, an Atlanta-based real estate investment management firm with around 55 employees, previously not only paid Salesforce subscription fees, but also hired a full-time staff member and an external consultant specifically to maintain its Salesforce account.

Dave Codrea, a partner at the company, said that the firm used Replit and Claude Code to develop custom applications to replace Salesforce's CRM functions, while also terminating contracts with real estate software companies Entrata and Yardi, saving approximately $100,000 annually, and the new application only incurs around $300 in monthly maintenance costs.

Adrian Balfour, owner of the Seattle Seawolves professional rugby team, stated that four engineers from the 70-person team spent four months using Claude Code to develop an application that replaced Salesforce CRM and the ticketing system AXS, reducing software spending by roughly $100,000, and recording a year-over-year revenue increase of about 25% since the season kicked off in March this year.

Hank AI, a South Carolina-based medical software company with 24 full-time employees, did not renew its $40,000 annual contract with Salesforce in January this year, and instead built its own application using Claude Code, with an estimated annual fee of around $500. Atonom, a Utah-based startup with 45 employees, also abandoned its $40,000 annual Salesforce contract in January, switched to building a custom CRM with Lovable, and expects annual operating costs to be only $1,200.

02

Large Enterprises Are Also Testing the Waters, But Facing Greater Resistance

This trend is not entirely limited to small businesses, as some large corporations have also begun to explore similar paths, but are confronted with more complex challenges.

French biopharmaceutical giant Sanofi, which has around 75,000 employees, sees its Chief Digital Officer Emmanuel Frenehard note that the company is reducing its reliance on ServiceNow, and instead using Claude Code and Cursor to build AI agents, combining software from Utah-based startup Elementum and data stored on Snowflake to handle tasks such as equipment failure reports.

Sanofi's goal is to shift 80% of the workload currently handled by ServiceNow, other software, and outsourcing firms, saving at least $10 million per year. Frenehard admitted that this transformation has "faced considerable resistance" within his team.

Bobby Mukherjee, CEO of IT consulting firm Loka, said that a handful of clients have cut their annual software costs by 40% to 80% through self-built AI alternatives, but he usually advises clients to retain their existing SaaS applications, as the replacement process is slow and "would pull engineering resources away from things that can truly create business differentiation."

He said that "the smarter approach is usually to build on top of existing systems," and emphasized that "no serious person is predicting the demise of HubSpot or Salesforce."

03

SaaS Giants Push Back: Enterprise-Grade Reliability Cannot Be Replaced by "Vibe Coding"

Facing external doubts, traditional software vendors like Salesforce are actively defending their business models, backed by renewal data.

Srini Tallapragada, President of Salesforce, stated on an investor call last fall that enterprise customers "have all tried to do it themselves, but they realize that you cannot achieve enterprise-level reliability and security through vibe coding." ServiceNow noted that most of its customers are "expanding their use of ServiceNow rather than leaving," citing a 97% contract renewal rate in the first quarter of this year as supporting evidence, a figure that has remained stable in recent quarters.

However, market confidence in this narrative is not solid. The Information previously reported that OpenAI executives stated during an investor presentation earlier this year that the company expects its future products to replace software from companies including Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, and Atlassian.

At the same time, some large enterprises are increasing their budgets for AI vendors like Anthropic, while shortening the contract terms with traditional enterprise software vendors or demanding more favorable terms.

04

The True Cost of Replacement: Data Migration Remains the Biggest Barrier

Despite the eye-catching replacement cases among small businesses, analysts point out that the technical and organizational barriers to large-scale migration cannot be underestimated.

Bobby Mukherjee pointed out that the "true total cost of ownership" of enterprise software is usually four times the sticker price, but "completely replacing it is still a last resort." The core stickiness of platforms like Salesforce lies in the customized code (i.e., "workflows") that enterprises have continuously added over the years. These workflows track everything from product catalogs to pricing and customer commitments, and many large enterprises even hire dedicated teams to maintain these workflows, further driving up migration costs.

Demetri Salvaggio, an executive at corporate travel management app Engine, whose company has around 1,000 employees and has been a Salesforce customer for nearly a decade, estimates that a migration would take at least a year, and the company has no plans to leave at present.

For investors, the current core question is: Will the improvement in the capabilities of AI coding tools spread this trend from small businesses to mid-sized and large customer groups? If AI continues to advance in coding and processing large databases, the influence of SaaS vendors over large clients also faces the risk of being eroded.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Hard AI", written by Li Jia, edited by Hard AI, and republished with authorization from 36Kr.