Replacing your SaaS stack: a 30-day plan

Most "leave SaaS" plans assume you can stop the business for a week. You can't. This is the plan we walk operators through when they've decided to move to a local-first stack but still have payroll to run and customers to onboard while they do it.

It's four weeks. Each week has one objective, one measurable outcome, and one thing you don't have to finish.

Week 0 — Decide what you're actually keeping

Before you do anything, audit. Open a spreadsheet. One row per SaaS tool. Columns:

Tool
What it does for us
Cost / year
People who would notice if it disappeared tomorrow
Where the canonical data for this lives

You'll find three buckets:

Keep — your accounting system, your payroll provider, your bank. These are not the fight.
Replace — your CRM, task tracker, ATS, wiki, automation glue. This is the fight.
Cancel — the tools no one actually uses. The fastest savings live here.

The Cancel column will pay for the rest of the plan. Cancel them this week.

Week 1 — Install the new floor

Install the local-first OS. For most of our users this means Excellent, but the plan works for any local-first stack — substitute as needed.

Goals for the week:

The new system is installed and reachable on your laptop.
You can read and write a record in each of: tasks, CRM, hiring, docs.
One agent role is configured and runs against your own LLM key.

What you're not doing this week:

Migrating any data.
Telling the team.
Canceling anything you didn't already cancel in Week 0.

The goal is operational comfort with the new floor. Spend an hour each evening using it as if it were already your tool. Add a fake lead. Move it through the pipeline. Have the agent draft an outreach email. See where the rough edges are.

Week 2 — Migrate the CRM

CRM goes first because it's the easiest to validate (every record has a contact you can call) and the highest-cost subscription.

The migration sequence:

Freeze writes in the old CRM for one weekend. Tell the team.
Export the canonical model from the old CRM — contacts, companies, deals, activities, notes. Use the deepest export the vendor offers, not the CSV.
Import into the new system. Map fields. Re-key associations.
Verify a sample of 50 records by hand. If your activity history didn't come over, this is when you find out.
Switch outbound and pipeline work to the new system on Monday.
Cancel the old CRM at the end of Week 2 — after you've verified.

Do not run two CRMs in parallel for "a quarter just to be safe." The team will continue updating the old one out of habit and your data will fork. Two weeks of overlap is the right amount.

What you're actually solving

The CRM migration is also the agent configuration milestone. By end of Week 2:

A Triager agent watches the inbound and qualifies new leads.
A Scribe agent drafts outreach you review and send.
A Verifier agent gates anything autonomous.

If the agents don't materially reduce ops time by end of Week 2, the rest of the plan needs to be re-evaluated. Most of the value of moving lives here.

Week 3 — Migrate tasks and hiring

Easier than the CRM. Tasks because the data is mostly disposable; hiring because most ATSs already give you a clean export.

Tasks first:

Export your active issues from Linear / Jira / Asana / wherever.
Import into the new tasks app.
Archive (don't delete) the old tool. Cancel at the end of the week.

Hiring next:

Move active job postings to the new ATS first — close the old postings, redirect URLs.
Migrate active candidates only. Historical candidates can be archived as JSON; you'll rarely revisit them.
Cancel the old ATS at the end of the week.

What you're skipping:

Historical task archives older than 90 days. Nobody opens them.
Historical candidates older than 12 months. Same.
Custom dashboards. Recreate the ones you actually used; let the rest go.

This is the week the new system stops feeling like a side project and starts feeling like the operation.

Week 4 — Replace the glue

The last week is the unglamorous one: pulling out Zapier, retiring custom scripts, and wiring the integrations directly.

The pattern that works:

Make a list of every Zap, Make scenario, or n8n flow currently running.
For each, ask: can this be replaced by an agent goal in the new system?

Most Zaps are deterministic if-this-then-thats that exist because the SaaS tools couldn't talk to each other. With a local-first OS where the data is co-located, half of them disappear. The other half become agent goals with budgets and audit trails.

By end of Week 4:

The Zapier subscription is canceled.
The remaining custom scripts are committed to your repo and read from the local database.
One person on the team can explain, end-to-end, how a new lead moves from inbound to closed without naming a vendor tool.

What's left

After the four weeks:

One license for the local-first OS instead of six SaaS subscriptions.
A database file on your machine that holds your CRM, tasks, hiring, and docs.
Agents doing the unglamorous middle of every workflow.
Audit trails for everything the agents did.
A repo of integration scripts you own.

Most teams find they free up between $20k and $80k of annual SaaS spend, plus 5–15 hours/week of "moving data between tools" time. The exact numbers depend on team size and how much SaaS you'd accumulated — our ROI page walks through a representative workspace line by line.

What this plan deliberately doesn't do

It doesn't move your accounting system. Stick with QuickBooks / Xero / whatever — local-first accounting is a separate buying decision.
It doesn't move your email. Email is its own protocol; that's a different post.
It doesn't move your bank. Obvious, but worth saying.
It doesn't move your calendar. Google or Apple is fine; integrate via the standard CalDAV/iCal feeds.

The fight is the operational stack — the tools that store who you talk to, what you're working on, who you're hiring, and how the work moves. Those are the tools you want back.

When this plan fails

It fails when teams:

Try to do all four migrations in week one (overcommitment).
Run two systems in parallel for a quarter "just in case" (the data forks).
Skip the verification step (you find out about lost data three months later).
Don't configure agents in week 2 (you've moved tools, not transformed work).

The 30 days is the right cadence. Less is reckless; more is procrastination.

Next up: if you want to apply this plan to a specific category, the HubSpot, Linear, and Notion comparisons run the same numbers concretely. Or join the waitlist and we'll send the migration checklist as a one-pager.