Both terms describe recurring revenue, both get pitched to agencies as “the future,” and both show up in the same breath so often that most people use them as if they’re interchangeable. They’re not, and the difference has a direct effect on what you should charge.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is a company selling software it built, directly to the people who use it. WaaS (Website as a Service) is an agency selling ongoing access to a website or portal, usually to its own local or niche clients, often built on infrastructure the agency doesn’t own outright. The subscription wrapper looks identical from the outside. What’s underneath it isn’t.
What SaaS Actually Means
A SaaS company builds one product, hosts it centrally, and sells accounts to it. Every customer runs on the same codebase, updates ship to everyone at once, and the company that built it owns the entire relationship with the end user, from the free trial to the support ticket. Slack, Xero, and Mailchimp are all SaaS in the strict sense: one product, sold directly, at scale.
What WaaS Actually Means
We’ve covered this in more depth elsewhere, but the short version: WaaS is an agency reselling access to a website or portal on a subscription basis instead of billing a one-time project fee.
The agency sits between the underlying software (which it may or may not have built itself) and the end client, who’s usually a local business, a church, or another organisation the agency already has a relationship with.
That middle position is the whole distinction. A SaaS company has no agency in between. A WaaS business, almost by definition, is the agency in between.
Who Actually Owns the Software in Each Model?
This is the question that separates the two cleanly:
| SaaS | WaaS | |
| Who built the core product | The company selling it | Often licensed or subscribed to from someone else |
| Who owns the customer relationship | The software company | The agency |
| Who sets the price the end user pays | The software company | The agency |
| How many end customers per install | Thousands, on shared infrastructure | Usually one client per site |
| What the buyer is actually paying for | The software itself | The software, plus the agency’s setup, branding, and support |
A WaaS agency is rarely writing the underlying code. It’s licensing infrastructure – whether that’s a hosting platform, a multisite plugin, or a finished white-label portal – and then reselling access to it under its own brand, at its own price, to its own clients. The software company behind that infrastructure (which might be a SaaS business itself) never touches the end client directly.
Why This Distinction Matters for Pricing
If you’re pricing a WaaS product as if you were a SaaS company, you’ll get it wrong in one of two directions.
Underpricing happens when an agency treats WaaS like hosting resale – charging $20–$40 a month because that’s roughly what a hosting markup looks like. That number ignores everything else in the package: the setup, the branding, the support, and the fact that the client would otherwise be paying a SaaS vendor directly for the same core functionality, often at a higher price.
Overpricing happens in the other direction – trying to charge SaaS-company margins (thousands of customers sharing one infrastructure cost) when a WaaS agency is running a much smaller number of sites, each with real setup and support time attached.
The right anchor is usually the SaaS product the client would otherwise buy. If a church would pay a giving platform directly for a comparable feature set, the agency’s white-label version should price somewhere in that range or below it, because it’s saving the client from a separate vendor relationship, not asking them to pay twice.
Can a WaaS Business Behave Like SaaS?
To some extent, yes, and this is where the two models start to blur. An agency that licenses a finished, purpose-built product (rather than assembling a generic site from a page builder) is effectively reselling a SaaS-grade product under its own name. The client experience – logging into a dashboard, using features built specifically for their industry, paying a predictable monthly fee – looks and feels like SaaS, even though the agency in the middle is running it as WaaS.
This is the model behind WPWaaS’s Church Portal: the underlying software is built once, to a genuine industry spec (membership, giving, attendance, events), and agencies subscribe to deploy it under their own brand rather than building an equivalent from scratch. The agency’s client experiences software, not a marketing site with a login page bolted on.
Which Model Fits Your Agency?
Almost no WordPress agency should be trying to become a SaaS company outright – that’s a different business, with different engineering and support obligations. The realistic choice is between two flavors of WaaS:
- Generic WaaS, where you’re reselling a templated site plus hosting. Lower setup effort, lower ceiling on what a client will pay.
- Vertical WaaS, where you’re reselling purpose-built software for one industry. More setup effort upfront (or a subscription to infrastructure that’s already built), but a much higher ceiling, because the client is replacing a real tool, not just paying for a nicer website.
If you’re deciding between building that infrastructure yourself or subscribing to something finished, see how WPWaaS works or check the plan pricing against how many clients you could realistically sell to in the first year.