WorkflowAudit: Customization Boundary Analyzer for Vertical SaaS

at what point does vertical SaaS just become a services business?

at what point does vertical SaaS just become a services business?

The line that's worked for people I know who did this well: configure the input, standardize the output. Every clinic's workflow looks different because of legacy habits, whoever's been doing it for 10 years, and which payer portals they got stuck using. But the actual decision logic underneath, like whether something's covered, what's needed for auth, why a claim got denied, is way more standardized than it looks when you're five customer calls deep and everyone swears their situation is unique. The trap is building configurability into that logic layer instead of the intake layer. That's the moment "flexible SaaS" quietly turns into custom software, because now every customer's special case lives inside a rules engine that only your most senior dev actually understands, and every new feature has to get threaded through a dozen tenants' worth of exceptions. What tends to hold up better: keep the core logic (payer rules, auth requirements, denial handling) as one system that doesn't bend per customer. Let all the "this clinic uses their EHR, that one uses portals" stuff live in the integration and intake layer instead. You can have 15 different ways data gets in and out. You shouldn't have 15 different versions of what happens once it's in. Honestly the real tell isn't "we did onboarding and setup for a customer." Every vertical SaaS does that. It's when a support person becomes the actual source of truth for how a customer's process works, and that knowledge never makes it back into the product as something reusable. If your best people are quietly doing manual workarounds as part of "customer success," that's not support, that's unpriced services propping up your margins. Good gut check: could someone brand new, with zero tribal knowledge, set up a new customer using only what's in the product? If yes, you're still SaaS, just with a services-heavy onboarding motion. If the real answer is "eh, Sarah just handles the weird ones," you're running an agency with a login page.