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Behind a surprising number of the apps people open every day sits the same quiet arrangement: the company whose name is on the product did not write most of the code. It licensed a ready-made platform, added its branding and went to market. This build-versus-rent decision now shapes whole industries, and the economics behind it are worth understanding for anyone running or funding a digital business.
The case against building from scratch
Building a transactional platform — one that handles accounts, payments, reporting and compliance — is expensive and slow. A serious in-house effort can run into hundreds of thousands of dollars and take a year or more before the first customer is served, and that is before counting the engineers needed to maintain it afterwards.
Renting changes the maths. A vertical SaaS provider has already absorbed those costs across many clients, so a newcomer pays a setup fee and a recurring or revenue-linked charge instead of a large upfront investment. The trade-off is control: the tenant accepts the platform’s architecture and update schedule in exchange for speed and lower risk. For most companies that are not themselves software firms, that trade is worth making.
Vertical SaaS, not generic tools
The shift is not about generic tools like email or spreadsheets. It is about vertical SaaS — software built deeply for one industry, with that sector’s rules and workflows baked in. The global SaaS market was estimated at well over US$300 billion in 2024 by Fortune Business Insights, and vertical products are among its fastest-growing segments precisely because they solve problems generic software cannot.
A few examples show the range:
- Shopify lets a retailer launch an online store without writing checkout, inventory or payment code.
- Toast gives restaurants a point-of-sale and ordering system tuned to how kitchens actually run.
- Regulated entertainment platforms supply game catalogues, player accounts and compliance tooling to operators who handle only marketing and licensing.
In each case the customer buys speed and focus, and the supplier carries the engineering burden.
Where regulation makes renting almost mandatory
The pull toward renting is strongest in heavily regulated sectors, because compliance is the hardest part to build and the most dangerous to get wrong. A provider running an online casino platform across several markets, for instance, has to localise not just language and currency but KYC and anti-money-laundering checks, tax reporting and payment rails for each licence — work that few new entrants could replicate alone. As the Herald previously covered in its Aviator demo explainer, much of what a user experiences as a single product is in fact assembled from specialist suppliers sitting behind the brand.
Payments are part of the same story. Across much of Africa, mobile money rather than cards dominates, so a platform has to integrate with networks like EcoCash or M-Pesa to be usable at all. Building those integrations and keeping them compliant is exactly the kind of work a shared platform spreads across its tenants. The Financial Action Task Force sets out the customer due-diligence standards such businesses must meet in its recommendations, and meeting them is far cheaper as one of many clients than as a lone builder.
The limits of the model
Renting is not free of cost beyond the invoice. A tenant is exposed to the provider’s outages, pricing changes and roadmap decisions, and deep customisation is often limited — the back office, reporting structure and bonus logic are usually where white-label constraints bite hardest. Companies that grow large enough sometimes bring development in-house precisely to escape those limits.
Still, for the stage most businesses are at, the logic holds. Software is no longer something every company builds; for a growing share, it is something they rent, brand and operate — and the firms that understand which parts to rent and which to own are the ones that move fastest without overreaching.
Online Reporter