Outgrowing Spreadsheets
The signs a spreadsheet has become a business system.
Per-seat software is priced to be affordable at ten users and expensive at a hundred. The point where a custom build costs less often arrives somewhere above thirty or forty users, but seat count is only part of the math. Here is how to run it for your own situation, and what the numbers leave out.
Updated September 2026 · Stephen Backholm, Founder
Compare what you pay each month for the subscription with what a custom tool costs to run each month once it is built. The difference is your monthly saving, and the build cost divided by that saving is your break-even in months.
| Cost | How to Calculate It |
|---|---|
| Subscription, per year | Seats × monthly price per seat × 12 |
| Custom build | The one-time build cost |
| Custom, per year after launch | Maintenance (about 5–20% of build cost) plus hosting |
| Break-even, in months | Build cost ÷ (monthly subscription − monthly custom running cost) |
| Per-Seat Subscription | Custom Tool | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront | $0 | $28,000 |
| Per year | $21,600, and rising | About $4,000 |
| Break-even | — | About nineteen months |
| After break-even | — | Saves about $17,600 a year |
Forty seats at $45 a month is $21,600 a year. A $28,000 custom tool built for exactly those forty people costs about $4,000 a year to host and maintain. Counting that ongoing cost, it pays for itself in about nineteen months, and from then on saves roughly $17,600 a year.
True Cedar figures and commitments here are examples to help you plan, not a quote, an offer, or a contract. Every engagement is governed by its own written statement of work and agreement.
Per-seat pricing grows in a straight line with headcount. At the same $45 per seat, one hundred users cost $54,000 a year.
A custom tool does not work that way. Below a few hundred users, the number of people using an internal application barely moves what it costs to build. So every seat you add raises the subscription and leaves the build roughly where it was, and the break-even arrives sooner.
A break-even calculation compares costs, not value. Your subscription fee also pays for someone else's product roadmap, their support desk, their security and compliance certifications, and features you may grow into later. A custom tool gives you none of that; you get exactly what you asked for.
So the question is not only which is cheaper. Build when the tool does not fit your process and the seats are the price of a poor fit. Keep paying when the product fits, the team is small, the work is commodity, or you depend on certifications you could not justify obtaining yourself.
Our internal tools page covers what replacing a per-seat tool with custom software typically involves.
The signs a spreadsheet has become a business system.
When a flexible tool has turned into a workaround.
Four questions that tell you whether a software problem is worth revisiting.
Tell us the tool, the seat count, and what it does not do. We will tell you whether building makes sense, and when it does not.