Guest blog by Kristen Che, COO at ReSpark
For the past decade, SaaS has been the default for policy administration systems—the promise of agile software, manageable monthly payments and dev-free staffing. But a growing number of founders and seasoned investors are pushing back. Why? Because those endless recurring payments come with steep, often hidden costs: loss of ownership, unpredictable future spend, and dependence on the vendor’s roadmap, not yours.
As more founders confront the fine print and real-world trade-offs of SaaS, it’s time to reconsider a 90s trend (they’re cool again after all). What if the smartest move for your insurtech isn’t SaaS, but taking back control of your tech with a perpetual license?
This Isn’t Your Parents’ Perpetual License
The insurance world requires specialty knowledge to undergird any successful policy administration system. They used to take years to build and full teams to maintain. That time, knowledge, and expertise led to eye-watering price tags and lengthy implementation cycles that only the biggest players could afford.
But ReSpark‘s perpetual license is an entirely different beast.
ReSpark is built on a flexible architecture that gets you to market in weeks, not months. Pre-built components handle the most important elements of a PAS—rating, quoting, binding, issuing, endorsements, renewals, and claims—and a custom onboarding process integrates your products and tech stack to get you robust policy administration from day one.
Then it’s in your hands to completely customize and adapt to best-in-class third-party platforms. The old perpetual license model meant committing to yesterday’s technology and living with it forever. The new model gives you the best of both worlds: you own your tech outright, but your PAS integrates seamlessly with innovative new products, so you’re not painting yourself into a corner as technology advances.
Even better, ReSpark’s perpetual license costs just one to two years of SaaS fees. Tell your CFO they can zero out your PAS costs in 2027 and see what happens to your bottom line.
Why Perpetual Licensing Is Founder-Friendly
You Keep the Upside: Premium payments grow your company instead of inflating your SaaS provider’s profits. Your success doesn’t become someone else’s recurring revenue stream.
Predictability You Can Trust: Unlike SaaS, perpetual licenses mean no unexpected price hikes, no forced renewals, and no surprise lockouts. This isn’t just comforting—it’s critical when selling into regulated sectors or planning capital-efficient growth. Try explaining to your board why your software costs tripled just as you’re scaling.
Freedom to Innovate: Want to layer on advanced analytics for parametric claims, personalized pricing, or data management? With your own PAS, you integrate, customize, and scale without waiting for a SaaS vendor’s quarterly priorities. You’re not stuck in a queue behind enterprise customers with bigger contracts. You build what you need, when you need it.
The AI Advantage: Why Ownership Matters Now More Than Ever
Here’s where perpetual licensing becomes a true competitive weapon. The insurtech game is changing fast with the rise of AI—autonomous software agents can quote, underwrite, and even manage claims and compliance at lightning speed. Policy admin is no longer about manual tasks and endless paperwork. The companies that win will be those who seamlessly weave AI into every workflow, analytics channel, and customer portal.
That’s where owning your code base truly pays off. With a perpetual license, you’re not beholden to someone else’s API roadmap or plugin restrictions. Instead, you can:
- Rapidly integrate the latest generative AI tools, agentic workflows, or domain-specific models directly into your policy admin system—no waiting for your SaaS vendor to build it.
- Streamline operations by automating underwriting, accelerating claims to real-time processing, and smashing through legacy bottlenecks in billing, compliance, and customer service.
- Customize every layer—from digital agent interfaces to claims automation and compliance triggers—so your unique value proposition isn’t constrained by a SaaS vendor’s lowest-common-denominator settings.
- Experiment, iterate, and deploy breakthroughs fast, without waiting for vendor approval, risky upgrades, or feature releases.
As agentic coding matures, the ability to continuously adapt, merge, and extend AI across products and business lines will separate the breakthrough insurtechs from everyone else.
With a fully-owned PAS, your innovation moves as quickly as your ambition—faster, cheaper, and with no external constraints. That’s how you build not just a better startup, but a market leader.
The Fine Print: SaaS Isn’t Always Bad, But…
Yes, SaaS can be great for trial projects and companies needing minimal IT lift. But if your ambition is to own your tech, build defensible IP, and avoid diluting the very business you’re fighting to grow, perpetual licensing aligns incentives in your favor. Just ask the founders who watched SaaS fees balloon over time or scrambled when vendors tweaked roadmaps at will.
From the Field: ReSpark & Lassie’s Perpetual Strategy
We’re not just reciting theory; here’s how a modern insurtech startup used a perpetual license to leap ahead:
Lassie, a Swedish pet insurance company, faced the classic early-stage dilemma: how to launch, grow, and impress investors without sinking months into building custom tech or shelling out a percentage of every premium to a SaaS provider. Their answer? Buy a perpetual license for their policy administration system from ReSpark after using it as a SaaS platform for a year.
The results:
Lightning-Fast Launch: With off-the-shelf policy admin tech, Lassie skipped years of tech hiring and built up multi-million dollar growth within two years.
Cost Control: There were no runaway commissions or surprise SaaS fees as they scaled past their first funding rounds.
True Platform Ownership: Because they owned their PAS outright, Lassie could quickly expand into new markets across Europe. They controlled their own roadmap, their own integrations, their own destiny.
Final Thought: Reclaiming Founder Power
Founders in insurtech and beyond are asking: why keep paying rent forever, when you can invest once and own the keys? The perpetual model isn’t just nostalgia—it’s a deliberate strategy for those who prioritize speed, control, and long-term value.
As both real-world case studies and industry data confirm, owning your policy admin stack isn’t just an operational choice. It’s the fast lane to serious growth—and serious founder equity—in an age of insurance disruption. When your tech stack is owned, not rented, your margins stay healthier and your ability to pivot stays sharper.
Your competitors are already locked into multi-year SaaS contracts they can’t escape. You don’t have to be. That’s not just an advantage—it’s your window to move faster, build better, and win.
If you’re a founder questioning your PAS strategy — book a meeting with me here to explore how a perpetual model could support your next stage of growth.
A note from Insurtech Gateway
At Insurtech Gateway, we back founders who challenge default assumptions in insurance infrastructure — and ReSpark does exactly that.
This blog articulates a tension we see repeatedly with early-stage and scaling insurtechs: SaaS PAS platforms can accelerate early momentum, but over time they often constrain ownership, economics, and innovation — especially as AI becomes embedded across underwriting, claims, and operations. ReSpark’s modern take on perpetual licensing reframes the trade-off, showing how founders can move fast and retain control of their roadmap, margins, and IP. The Lassie example is a particularly strong illustration of how this plays out in practice.
If you are challenging the assumptions within insurance infrastructure check out our incubator and fund to see how we might be able to help you build and launch.