The rental stack problem
Six to twelve subscriptions, none connected, all rising in price — why your e-commerce stack is opex, not an asset, and what to own instead.
The rental stack problem: why your SaaS subscriptions are not an asset
Walk into most e-commerce brands between €2M and €50M revenue and you will find the same architecture: six to twelve subscriptions, none of which talk to each other, all of which get more expensive every year, and none of which the company will ever own.
The industry calls this a stack. We call it rent. And rent compounds in the wrong direction.
The math operators feel but rarely model
Consider a mid-size D2C brand:
| Category | Typical tools | Rough annual spend |
|---|---|---|
| Commerce | Shopify Plus, apps | €15k–€40k |
| Support | Gorgias / Zendesk | €8k–€25k |
| Klaviyo | €10k–€35k | |
| Reviews / UGC | Yotpo, etc. | €5k–€15k |
| Analytics / BI | Triple Whale, Looker | €5k–€20k |
| Automation | Zapier, Make | €2k–€8k |
| Ads tooling | Various | €5k–€15k |
That is €50k–€150k+ per year in opex that grows with seats, contacts, and order volume. Every line item is someone else's product roadmap.
Now ask: if you sell the business, what transfers? Contracts. Logins. Configuration inside vendor UIs. Not an owned operations asset.
Integration debt is the hidden cost
Tools do not fail on price alone. They fail on fragmentation:
- Support cannot see live 3PL status without a tab switch
- Marketing cannot see inventory constraints when scheduling sends
- Ops builds the morning report by hand from eight exports
So you hire an ops person to be the human API between systems. That is the most expensive integration layer possible.
Our integrations page shows how agents connect Shopify, Stripe, Slack, Meta, Google Ads, and the rest into one owned layer instead of one overloaded hire.
Why "best-in-class" still feels broken
Best-in-class per category made sense when teams were smaller and channels were simpler. Today a brand might sell D2C, Amazon, Bol.com, and wholesale simultaneously.
Each channel adds:
- Another inbox
- Another feed
- Another policy surface
- Another renewal date
Point solutions multiply. Coherence does not.
That is why we package 362 agents as a library: not 362 subscriptions, but 362 workflows you deploy once in code you own.
Subscription vs. owned ops layer
| SaaS stack | Owned AI operations layer | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost model | Recurring, grows with scale | Build fee, then infra |
| Asset on exit | Low | High (code + workflows) |
| Cross-tool work | Manual or brittle zaps | Native to layer design |
| Policy changes | Re-configure each tool | Deploy update |
| Vendor risk | High (price, features) | You control roadmap |
We are not anti-SaaS. Shopify and Klaviyo are excellent systems of record. We are anti renting the work that connects them.
Symptoms you are stuck in the rental trap
You might recognize a few:
- Headcount tracks ticket volume linearly — every peak season means temp hires or burnout
- Nobody can explain the full order journey without opening five tabs
- Automation exists but nobody trusts it — too many edge cases broke in silence
- Board asks for efficiency — but opex on tools keeps climbing anyway
- Due diligence hurts — "where does this workflow live?" has no clean answer
If three or more sound familiar, the problem is architectural, not headcount.
What switching looks like (without ripping everything out)
We do not ask brands to cancel Shopify on day one. We ask: which workflows should you own?
Common first agents:
- Ticket Triage Agent — clears routine support overnight
- WISMO Resolver — order tracking without human copy-paste
- Daily Ops Briefing Agent — one morning digest from every system
- Abandoned Cart Agent — recovery flows tied to real inventory and margin rules
Ship in a week. Expand agent by agent. Keep your stack. Own the layer above it.
The exit and investment angle
Private equity and strategic buyers increasingly ask: what is proprietary?
Owned automation in your repo is a defensible answer. A dozen vendor configs is not.
Building an operations layer is not just cost savings. It is enterprise value: fewer key-person dependencies, faster integration post-acquisition, and ops that scale without linear hiring.
Stop renting the glue
The stack is not the problem. Renting the glue between stack parts is the problem.
187N builds that glue as owned agents: production-grade, security-first, delivered in one week.
Book a free audit call and we will map which subscriptions you keep, which workflows you should own, and the first agents that pay for the build.
Related: What an AI operations layer actually is · Own the work, not the busywork
