What a micro-SaaS is
Micro-SaaS is not a technology, it is a decision about scope: a web application that covers a single workflow completely, instead of many workflows halfway. One main screen, two or three roles, one export. Everything else is left out.
What separates it from a spreadsheet is operations: logins, permissions, backups, history, updates. What separates it from a large standard system is what is missing – and that the missing part is deliberate. Because the scope stays small, the decision stays small too.
When it beats the spreadsheet
As long as one person maintains the file and nobody audits it, the spreadsheet is unbeatable. It tips over in three places: several editors, evidence, and retyping. From the second person onwards you need permissions and one shared state; who changed what and when is in no filename; and every number moved by hand costs you again every month.
A workable test: count the minutes per week someone spends moving or correcting data. Multiply by a year. That is the figure worth talking about.
When standard software is the better answer
If your process is the same as in a thousand other companies, buy it. Payroll, point of sale, bookkeeping, classic CRM: there are mature products with years of regulatory change behind them. Paying for that work a second time is expensive and risky.
Building your own pays off where you deviate from the norm and the deviation is your business. Often the answer is both: standard software for the ordinary part, a micro-SaaS for the deviation, and an interface in between.
What running one actually takes
Building is the smaller part. Afterwards comes what keeps software alive: updates, backups that can actually be restored, monitoring, fixing what breaks. Plus the questions nobody asks at the start: who may see which data, how long is it kept, who hands it over?
That is why operations is a separate, monthly, cancellable item with us instead of a footnote. Whoever leaves it out of the first quote has only moved it onto your side of the table.
The path there
The same as for any custom software we build: first the sketch, free and done in a minute. Then the concept sprint at a fixed price, with a clickable prototype and a list of what deliberately isn't part of it. Then the MVP at a fixed price; code and rights go to you. After that, operations and further development, cancellable monthly.
We extend existing software at a fixed price as well, as long as the scope is clearly defined.