SaaS replacement engineering
Replatform a licensed product onto infrastructure you own.
The core practice. We pick one expensive contract, establish real parity on the features you actually use, migrate the data, run in parallel, and cut over. Techtons shows exactly what that looks like before you sign anything.
The premise
Buy commodity, build advantage. This is the practice everything else supports, and it is deliberately selective: one licensed product, one replacement, one cutover. We do not run portfolio transformations and we do not replace six things at once — the first replacement teaches your organisation how the second one goes, and it should be small enough that the lesson is cheap.
Where to see it
Every application in Techtons is a worked example of this service, with the parity matrix and the cost model already written.
What you get
- A parity matrix against the incumbent, written before any code, listing what we will build, what we will not build, and what your team decided they never used.
- A working application in your own AWS or Azure account, in your own repository, under a licence you control from the first commit.
- Terraform or Bicep for every environment, plus the pipeline that deploys it. No console clicks, no undocumented resource.
- A migration toolchain: extraction from the incumbent, schema mapping, a reconciliation report that counts rows and flags every mismatch, and a dry run you watch.
- Rebuilt integrations for the seams that made the old tool sticky — SSO, the directory sync, the two or three webhooks that quietly hold a business process together.
- A cutover runbook with a rollback path, rehearsed at least once against production-shaped data before the real date.
- Runbooks, ADRs and a trained team, or a Run agreement if you would rather we operated it for a while.
How it runs
5 phases, each with a date attached.
Durations below are what this shape of work typically takes with a team of two to four. They move with scope, and the assessment is where they stop being typical and start being yours.
- 01
Assessment
2 weeks, fixed priceUsage data, admin exports and interviews with the people who live in the product. We come back with the parity matrix, both cloud architectures, an infrastructure cost model and a delivery plan with dates. You keep the document whether or not you continue.
- 02
Parity definition and build
4 to 5 weeks for a typical systemA working system, demonstrated weekly against the parity matrix rather than against a backlog. The Techtons entry for the equivalent application is the starting point, so week one produces something you can log into.
- 03
Migration dry run
1 weekThe full extraction and load against a copy of production, with a reconciliation report. This is where the surprises live — the encoding, the soft-deleted records, the custom field nobody documented — and it is deliberately scheduled before you have committed to a date.
- 04
Parallel run and cutover
1 to 2 weeksBoth systems live, the old one authoritative, differences reported daily. When the difference report is boring for three consecutive days we cut over on a rehearsed runbook with a rollback that has been tested, not just written.
- 05
Hypercare and handover
30 daysWe are on your incident channel, we fix what breaks, and we spend the time writing down what we know. The exit criterion is your engineers shipping a change to the system without us in the room.
What it costs
No rate card on this page, on purpose.
The assessment is a fixed price for two weeks and it is deliberately small enough to sign without a business case. Everything after it is priced per phase, agreed before the phase starts, with the team shape written into the statement of work.
The size of a replacement is driven by three things: how much of the incumbent you actually use, how ugly the data extraction is, and how many integrations have to survive the move. A system with a clean export, one identity provider and three integrations is a fraction of the cost of the same system with fifteen years of custom fields and a nightly file drop nobody owns. The Techtons entry for the equivalent application carries our honest build estimate in engineer-weeks — that is the number we start the conversation from, and the assessment either confirms it or explains why it moved.
Infrastructure is billed by your cloud provider directly, to your account, and we never mark it up. The Techtons cost models show the arithmetic for a stated reference organisation with the assumptions listed.
A published day rate would be a number we could not stand behind for your specific situation, and every firm that publishes one quotes something different in the room. What we will commit to before you sign is the phase scope, the phase price and the team shape. Use the calculator for the replacement arithmetic against your own seat count.
Normally bought inside
Join
Hire a Forward Deployed Engineer. They sit in your team.
Monthly per engineer. 3-month minimum, 30-day exit.
Deliver
We take it end to end and hand over the keys.
Fixed price per phase. Run priced separately.
When not to buy this
3 reasons to walk away.
Every library entry has rows where the honest answer is no. Every service page has this section for the same reason: the cases below are ones we have seen go badly, and we would rather lose the work than deliver into them.
You are under about 150 seats
Per-seat pricing is genuinely cheap at small scale. The build does not pay back inside a horizon a finance director should accept, and we will show you the arithmetic that says so rather than shrinking the scope until the number works.
What you are buying is the attestation
A SOC 2 report to hand your auditor, a court-tested e-signature record, payroll certified in forty countries. Those are not features, they are liabilities somebody else has agreed to carry. Keep paying for them.
Nobody will own it in year three
Owned software needs an owner — a team, a budget line and an on-call rotation. If none of those will exist eighteen months from now, a licence is the honest answer and we would rather say it now.
Pick one contract. We will show you the replacement.
A two-week assessment: we take your single most expensive SaaS line item, establish what you actually use, and come back with a parity matrix, an architecture for AWS and Azure, a cost model and a delivery plan. Fixed price. If the answer is keep buying it, we will tell you that.