Harbinger of the “SaaSpocolypse”? Blitzy Built A Complete Architecture Rewrite of WebVella ERP
Apr 21, 2026 • Carly Levinsohn • 5 min read

The Death of SaaS Is Widely Exaggerated
Since February, it is difficult to miss the ominous and pervasive coverage of the "SAASpocalypse". Not many companies get to learn from Fortune 500 customers firsthand, but Blitzy does. From our Fortune 500 clients, we have discovered that very few wish to rewrite all of their core systems and maintain them.
Payroll, inventory, financial close, supply chain, and compliance reporting: each flows through two or three systems of record. SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, and a handful of others sit at the center. When these processes run well, nobody notices. Business stops if they stall.
With that said, many customers have expressed interest in identifying one or two systems they are not happy with and enhancing their existing solution.
Why Customers Feel Stuck
Customers do not end up stuck by accident. The major ERP and CRM vendors design their platforms to be closed by nature. Whatever interoperability they advertise is calibrated just enough to pass a procurement checklist. APIs that read but do not write. Export formats that ship the data without the schema. The effect is the illusion of freedom. Customers can move, in theory, until they try.
Gartner reports that 70% of ERP migrations fail their original business goals. The number is not a reflection of faulty builds or projects. The statistic demonstrates what lives inside these systems and how hard vendors work to keep them there.
License fees are only part of the problem. The real switching cost is a decade of accumulation: custom approval chains, industry-specific data fields, integrations to niche vendors and banks, and the working knowledge of a thousand process owners encoded as configurations nobody documented.
Migration isn't a data problem; it means rebuilding how you run your business. Customers don't stay because they love the product. Leaving becomes a risk they can't justify.
Workflows and Data Capture Are the Hard Part
The ERP core is close to a commodity. Double-entry accounting, general ledgers, purchase order objects, and customer records have been standardized for thirty years. ERPs are valuable precisely because they reflect the specific business processes shaped around them.
Workflow and data capture are where the real complexity lives. Approval routing has to match the org chart. Custom fields have to capture what the company actually tracks. Exception handling has to account for edge cases the business learned the hard way. Months and years of engineering time live in this layer, which is exactly why migrations fail. A new vendor hands you a blank platform and asks you to reimplement everything.
Open-source ERPs like WebVella solve the licensing issue, but not the workflow problem. Someone still has to build the approval logic, the custom entities, and the hooks into the rest of the business. That work still takes months or even years of engineering effort.
How Blitzy Changes the Equation
The bottleneck in enterprise software is in translating business needs into functionality developers can build and ship before requirements change.
Blitzy removes this constraint. The approval routing, custom fields, and exception handling that once took months to build can now be specified in plain language by the people who actually know the business. Blitzy handles the implementation.
Putting Blitzy to the Test
We turned to WebVella, an open-source, pluggable ERP and CRM platform built entirely on Microsoft .NET, targeting ASP.NET Core 9 with PostgreSQL 16 and deployable on Linux or Windows. It is MIT-licensed, distributed as NuGet packages, and designed for extension through plugins and a developer SDK. In a market dominated by PHP and Python alternatives, WebVella's mature ERP core paired with developer-focused .NET tooling makes it unique.
The platform is also the archetype of the licensing and workflow trade-off described previously. While the license is free, customization is not. Building real approval logic, custom entities, and integration hooks into a WebVella deployment still requires months of engineering effort.
The test was simple: could Blitzy take WebVella, a platform that still demands engineering investment, and deliver a production-grade approval workflow system from a single specification? Blitzy engineer Michael "Monty" Montanaro ran the experiment.
Workflow System Requirements
In order to successfully develop an enterprise-grade approval management solution, 9 core requirements were necessary. From the prompt, Blitzy recognized the main feature objectives for achieving our approval workflow system as:
Plugin Infrastructure — Foundational
WebVella.Erp.Plugins.Approvalplugin assembly with proper initialization, migration orchestration viaProcessPatches, and scheduled job registration viaSetSchedulePlans.Entity Schema — Define five core entities (
approval_workflow,approval_step,approval_rule,approval_request,approval_history) with complete field definitions, relationships, and migration patches.Workflow Configuration — Implement admin-facing services (
WorkflowConfigService,StepConfigService,RuleConfigService) for CRUD operations on workflow definitions with validation logic.Service Layer — Build core business logic services (
ApprovalWorkflowService,ApprovalRouteService,ApprovalRequestService,ApprovalHistoryService) for runtime workflow processing.Hook Integration — Implement entity hooks using
IErpPreCreateRecordHookandIErpPostUpdateRecordHookinterfaces to automatically trigger approval workflows on target entity operations.Background Jobs — Create three
ErpJobimplementations for notifications (5-minute cycle), escalations (30-minute cycle), and expired approval cleanup (daily).REST API — Expose
ApprovalControllerendpoints for workflow management, approval actions (approve/reject/delegate), and queries.UI Components — Develop four
PageComponentimplementations (PcApprovalWorkflowConfig,PcApprovalRequestList,PcApprovalAction,PcApprovalHistory) with standard view files.Dashboard Metrics — Create
PcApprovalDashboardcomponent withDashboardMetricsServicefor real-time KPIs (pending count, average time, approval rate, overdue count, recent activity).
Alongside the specifications above that drove the project's main goals, other assumptions were made. No modifications were made to WebVella's existing architecture or codebase. All changes had to adhere to C# .NET 9.0 standards. Security integration and database transaction safety were also kept in mind during implementation.
What Blitzy Built
Review the project guide that recaps the work. Blitzy finished tasks estimated to take 336 engineering hours in days. The platform successfully completed:
- All 9 core tasks: plugin infrastructure, entity schema, workflow configuration, service layer, hook integration, background jobs, REST API, UI components, and dashboard metrics
- 585/585 tests passing (371 unit + 214 integration) — 100% pass rate
- Build succeeds with 0 errors and 0 warnings in new code
- Application starts and runs successfully
- All critical bugs identified and fixed during validation
- End-to-end workflow integration verified
The outstanding development for the approval workflow system is minimal. Blitzy estimates the well-defined remaining assignments would take 20 engineering hours for a developer.
Implications
ERPs are the connective tissue of business operations. As the central system for modern organizations, enterprise resource planning software integrates core functions into a singular platform. WebVella is the foundation: open-source, modular, and designed with extensions in mind.
Customizing and further developing WebVella for each business's unique use cases still takes dedicated engineering effort for months. Blitzy changes that.
Development can be compressed into a fraction of the time without sacrificing quality. This project encapsulates only one workflow. For teams already running WebVella, the gap between what an ERP could do and what the platform actually does can close.
How can Blitzy help close the loop on building your critical software infrastructure? Book a call with us to learn more about what Blitzy can do for your enterprise.

