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Merebase / Alternatives
SaaS Alternatives

Stop Renting Software. Own It Instead.

Every app below costs A$50 to A$500 a month. A Merebase app built for one job is A$499. Scope agreed before you pay anything. These articles show you the maths.

CRM
HubSpot
Paying for 200 features. Using 3. A contact list with notes and reminders should not cost A$150 a month.
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Salesforce
Enterprise software sold to a small team. The admin overhead became a second job.
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Pipedrive
A$1,980 over three years to see your deals on a board. The pipeline view is good. The bill is not.
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Zoho CRM
Cheaper than Salesforce. Still a full enterprise CRM. Most small businesses use the contacts list and nothing else.
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Project Management
Monday.com
Per-seat pricing means every new hire makes your task board more expensive.
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Asana
The task list works. The other 90 percent of the platform is a door nobody opens.
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Trello
To Do. In Progress. Done. That was the whole board. Per-seat pricing turned it into a monthly expense.
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ClickUp
Promised one tool for everything. Three years later you use a task list and some statuses.
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Notion
Infinitely flexible. Most teams use it for meeting notes and a task list. The workspace maintenance became its own job.
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Invoicing
FreshBooks
Fifteen invoices a month. Paying A$1,200 a year. The invoicing tool should not cost more than the work it tracks.
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Xero
Great accounting software. Most small businesses use it to send invoices and check their balance. That is the whole use.
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Wave
The invoicing is free. Wave Payments takes 2.9 percent of every transaction. That is not free.
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QuickBooks
An accounting practice in a box. Most small service businesses send invoices and check what is outstanding. The rest goes to their accountant.
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Time Tracking
Harvest
Built for agencies with a resourcing manager. Small practices use the timer and the monthly summary. The rest is infrastructure they pay for and never open.
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Inventory
inFlow
A$1,380 a year to know what is on your own shelves. Monthly fees for stock you already own.
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Sortly
Per-user pricing to see photos of your own equipment. A small team paying monthly to look at a list they own.
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Dashboards & Reporting
Retool
Builds the tool faster. Someone still has to maintain it. A per-seat subscription on top of a tool you built yourself.
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Databox
Monthly fee to look at data you already own. A$3,600 over three years for a formatted view of your own numbers.
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Klipfolio
A subscription to display numbers that already exist in your business. The display layer should not cost this much.
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Customer Support
Zendesk
Enterprise pricing for a team handling 20 tickets a week. You are paying for a call centre platform you will never need.
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Freshdesk
The free tier hits limits. The paid tier bundles features you never wanted. Your support history lives on their servers.
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Proposals & Documents
PandaDoc
A$3,480 over three years to send formatted proposals and record when they were accepted. The tool outgrew the job.
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Proposify
Your proposal templates and acceptance records live on their servers. Built for a sales team. You send ten proposals a month.
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DocuSign
Five documents a month for signature. DocuSign charges per envelope. The per-transaction model makes a simple workflow expensive.
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HR
BambooHR
Per-employee pricing. A 20-person team pays A$7,200 over three years for a staff list with leave balances.
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Employment Hero
HR and payroll bundled together. Most small businesses needed somewhere to keep staff records. They pay for the whole platform.
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Workforce Management
Tanda
Per-employee rostering. Every casual you hire in December makes the software bill bigger too.
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Deputy
An award compliance engine for a team of eight. The roster changes weekly. The platform was built for something much larger.
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Trade & Field Service
ServiceM8
Three technicians. Twenty jobs a month. The quote, schedule, and invoice cycle does not need a field service management platform.
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Tradify
Two tradies. Thirty jobs a month. Quote it, book it, invoice it. Three features inside a platform built for a much larger operation.
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Your app is not on this list.

If your business is paying monthly for something you only use a fraction of, describe the job. A build architect comes back with a scope showing exactly what you get for A$499. No payment until you agree.

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