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Harbinger of the “SaaSpocolypse”? Blitzy Built A Complete Architecture Rewrite of WebVella ERP

Apr 21, 2026 • Carly Levinsohn • 5 min read

Harbinger of the “SaaSpocolypse”? Blitzy Built A Complete Architecture Rewrite of WebVella ERP

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:

  1. Plugin Infrastructure — Foundational WebVella.Erp.Plugins.Approval plugin assembly with proper initialization, migration orchestration via ProcessPatches, and scheduled job registration via SetSchedulePlans.

  2. Entity Schema — Define five core entities (approval_workflow, approval_step, approval_rule, approval_request, approval_history) with complete field definitions, relationships, and migration patches.

  3. Workflow Configuration — Implement admin-facing services (WorkflowConfigService, StepConfigService, RuleConfigService) for CRUD operations on workflow definitions with validation logic.

  4. Service Layer — Build core business logic services (ApprovalWorkflowService, ApprovalRouteService, ApprovalRequestService, ApprovalHistoryService) for runtime workflow processing.

  5. Hook Integration — Implement entity hooks using IErpPreCreateRecordHook and IErpPostUpdateRecordHook interfaces to automatically trigger approval workflows on target entity operations.

  6. Background Jobs — Create three ErpJob implementations for notifications (5-minute cycle), escalations (30-minute cycle), and expired approval cleanup (daily).

  7. REST API — Expose ApprovalController endpoints for workflow management, approval actions (approve/reject/delegate), and queries.

  8. UI Components — Develop four PageComponent implementations (PcApprovalWorkflowConfig, PcApprovalRequestList, PcApprovalAction, PcApprovalHistory) with standard view files.

  9. Dashboard Metrics — Create PcApprovalDashboard component with DashboardMetricsService for 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.

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Blitzy enables development teams to transform six-month software projects into six-day turnarounds using Blitzy OS, an agentic platform that enables thousands of AI Agents to 'think' and cooperate for hours to bulk build software with precision. The platform builds everything AI can deliver in a precise manner, around 80% of any roadmap or new product, supplemented with a human engineering guide to complete the remaining 20% needed for production. With over 27 patents and counting, Blitzy is actively hiring PhDs and senior developers in Cambridge, MA who have a passion for building AI that leverages 'System 2 Thinking' to solve problems at inference.

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Enterprises that aim to dramatically accelerate their software development velocity, development agencies with enterprise clients, development teams with complex existing products, and individuals looking to accelerate their own velocity on complex builds.

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Our patent-pending code ingestion framework maps a curated selection of robust, reliable, and secure open source software libraries that we track by version and update frequently. Combined with our proprietary code generation technology that specializes on enforcing enterprise-class software policies, Blitzy far exceeds the utility of typical chatbots and co-pilots in creating production-ready software at scale.

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Your team is responsible for bringing the requirements, and as an approver during the technical specification stage. We ask you to edit/approve the Technical Specification. The document is editable, so you can edit and approve to get exactly what you had in mind.

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Blitzy's multi-agent system is meticulously and rigorously trained to know what it can accomplish, and what needs to be left for the human engineers. This ensures you only receive quality code and have a clear picture of remaining tasks.

Does Blitzy do more than just autonomous code generation?

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Yes. Blitzy is a comprehensive platform that provides end-to-end development assistance. We support the entire development lifecycle by taking descriptive inputs and generating software requirements documents, technical design, code structure, and generative code within repos for your product.

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Quality and security matter deeply to us — and they were our biggest frustration with the copilots already on the market. That frustration is what led us to build something different: a system designed to meet enterprise standards from the start. Every piece of work passes through multiple QA agents that review each other's output before any code reaches you, so what you receive is held to a consistent quality bar rather than the variable output typical of single-pass code generation. We deliver production-grade code repositories. As with any code entering your environment — written by humans or AI — your team should still run its own QA, QC, and security testing before deployment. We build to a high standard and give your reviewers a strong starting point; final validation stays with the team that owns the production environment.

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Blitzy uses a two-phase pricing model: evaluation followed by deployment. This structure lets enterprises validate ROI at their preferred scale before committing to organization-wide implementation. The evaluation phase provides three options. Reverse Engineer ($0) offers an initial assessment with complete codebase reverse engineering and understanding up to 100K lines of code; Proof of Concept ($50K for a 2-month term), where Blitzy delivers a guided POC to demonstrate value; or Structured Pilot ($250K for a 6-month term), which fully deploys Blitzy in your environment with 5M lines onboarding and 1.25M lines generation to prove production readiness. Following successful evaluation, organizations choose between three deployment paths. Commercial ($500K typical investment per year) adopts Blitzy on one team to accelerate a defined initiative: the first 20M lines onboarded are included, with additional onboarding at $0.10 per line and generation at $0.20 per line starting at 2.5M lines, plus dedicated infrastructure and SAML-SSO. Enterprise ($5M typical investment per year) rolls Blitzy out across your engineering organization, with onboarding billed at $0.10 per line across the full codebase — a typical engagement onboards 50M lines — and generation at $0.20 per line as needed, adding a Dedicated AI Solutions Consultant, 2 Forward Deployed Engineers, org-wide onboarding and certification, and priority support. Transformation ($50M typical investment per year) supports your largest codebases, with a typical engagement onboarding 500M lines at the same per-line rates, custom deployment, and embedded teams including a Field CTO, a Dedicated AI Solutions Consultant, 6 Forward Deployed Engineers, and 2 Forward Deployed Designers for complete digital transformation. All tiers maintain SOC 2 Type II compliance, ISO 27001 certification, and guarantee no training on your code. Pricing follows a transparent two-rate model: $0.10 per line onboarded for reverse engineering and $0.20 per line generated for forward engineering. Because reverse engineering also produces complete technical documentation of your codebase, onboarding-only engagements are fully supported, and in every tier costs align directly with the value delivered.

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The system defaults to taking advantage of all technology upgrades when modernizing or upgrading to the latest technology stack. For example, if you specify an upgrade to Java 21, the system will by default implement virtual threads, as it's generally seen as a superior technical approach. If you do not want this, you must simply tell the system to 'make as few changes as possible to achieve the desired request'. Being as specific as possible about what functionality is (and is not) desired helps yield results that will align with expectations.

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Blitzy agents rely on the actual source code of your existing codebase—not the Tech Spec documentation—when performing refactors or extending functionality. However, an accurate Tech Spec significantly aids the system's efficiency in querying the underlying representation of the code. Therefore, investing time to ensure the Tech Spec reflects the core features of the application will yield expectation-aligned results and will save time with last-mile development.

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Yes! Blitzy excels at working with existing codebases, using them as a foundation to ensure consistent, high-quality development. The platform enables you to add new features to existing products, generate comprehensive documentation, and tackle technical debt by upgrading legacy systems to state-of-the-art technologies or refactoring complex codebases. Our platform deploys dedicated AI agents that map and understand your codebase before generation, ensuring intelligent, contextualized development that aligns with your existing patterns and standards.

What programming languages does Blitzy support?

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Blitzy's AI platform works with all programming languages.

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Structure and organization are crucial when prompting Blitzy. The most effective prompts follow our prompting template with clear sections for WHY (vision & purpose), WHAT (core requirements), and HOW (technical details, user experience & implementation priorities). Each section should be detailed but concise, focusing on essential information while providing relevant context. Including structured frameworks and concrete examples - like data models, user stories, or feature templates - helps Blitzy deliver more precise and purposeful solutions.

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During code generation, Blitzy compiles your codebase and performs runtime validation to ensure the generated code works correctly. To enable this, we require: (1) Internal dependencies - any private packages, libraries, or binaries not publicly available that your code needs to build and run, (2) Environment variables and secrets - API keys, credentials, and configuration values required for compilation and runtime (shared securely through our encrypted UI, never exposed to AI agents), and (3) Build instructions - the specific steps or scripts needed to compile your code, typically found in your README or setup documentation. This information allows Blitzy to replicate your development environment and verify that all generated code functions properly before delivery.

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Create a .blitzyignore file in your repository's root directory to specify which files or paths Blitzy should exclude during tech-spec generation and code generation. This works similarly to .gitignore - simply list the file patterns, directories, or specific files you want Blitzy to skip, using standard gitignore syntax like *.log, /build/, or config/secrets.json. To ensure Blitzy respects these exclusions, mention in both your codebase context prompt and target state prompt that Blitzy should reference the .blitzyignore file and exclude those paths from processing.

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At this time, jobs are not cancelable. Once you submit, it consumes the assigned quota.

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