Stop Building Your Business on Leasehold Land.

Most businesses do not have a technology strategy. They have a credit card and a panic.

It usually starts innocently enough. You need a website, so you spin up a WordPress instance. Then you realise the contact form looks terrible, so you subscribe to Typeform (£50/month). Then you need to collect emails, so you grab MailChimp (£60/month). Then you need to landing pages that actually convert, so you get ClickFunnels (£120/month).

Finally, you realise none of these tools talk to each other, so you pay for Zapier (£40/month) to act as the digital duct tape holding it all together.

The Leasehold Trap

In the property world, we understand the difference between Leasehold and Freehold.

• Leasehold: You have the right to live there, but you pay ground rent, you answer to a landlord, and you have restrictions on what you can change.
• Freehold: You own the building. You own the land. You make the rules.

In the digital world, 90% of small businesses are building on Leasehold land.

When you build your entire business logic inside ClickFunnels or Wix, you are a tenant. You are renting your own customer data. If you stop paying the monthly rent, your business disappears. If they raise their prices (and they will), you have no choice but to pay.

You are building equity for their shareholders, not yours.

The "Complexity Premium"

The SaaS Tax isn't just about the monthly fees. It’s about the hidden cost of complexity.

I audited a client recently who had five different versions of "The Customer."

1. A subscriber in MailChimp.
2. A lead in HubSpot.
3. A buyer in Stripe.
4. A user in WordPress.
5. A row in a Google Sheet called "FINAL_DATA_V3.xlsx".

Because their data was trapped in disconnected silos, they had no Single Source of Truth. They were paying a premium for the privilege of being disorganised.

The Alternative: The Digital Freehold

There is a better way. It involves moving from "Renting" to "Owning." I advocate for building Digital Freeholds.

Instead of stitching together five different subscription tools, we build a single, bespoke application using modern engineering standards (Next.js and Google Cloud).

• The Frontend: Hard-coded for speed. No plugins to hack. No themes to break.
• The Backend: Your database, your authentication, and your hosting in one place.
• The Cost: You pay for the build once. You own the code forever.

Because we use enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure (Google Firebase), the running costs for most SMEs are effectively zero.

Do the Maths

Let’s look at a 3-year horizon.

You break even in month 11. Every month after that is pure profit retention.

Stop Renting. Start Owning.

If you are a serious business, you need to own your infrastructure. You need to control your data. You need to stop paying rent on your own success.

Check your bank statement today. Count the subscriptions. Calculate your SaaS Tax.

If the total is higher than you expected, it’s time to build a Freehold.