Every SaaS tool you adopt asks something of you that isn’t money.

It asks for a login. A tab. A mental model of how it works. A place in your workflow where you context-switch out of what you’re doing, do the thing in the other tool, and context-switch back. It asks you to remember one more URL, one more set of credentials, one more place where your data lives.

This cost is invisible in demos. The demo shows you the output — the analysis, the report, the extracted table — without showing you the friction of getting there. You log in once, upload a file, see the result, and think: that was fast.

But you’re seeing the first login. What the demo doesn’t show is the tenth login. The fifteenth upload. The moment three months in when you have a quick question about a lease, you’re already in your AI client, and you think: do I really want to open that tab?

The tenth login is where SaaS tools lose people.

Not because the tool is bad. Often the tool is genuinely excellent. But the friction of leaving your current context, finding the right tool, authenticating, uploading your documents to yet another company’s servers, and getting your output — that friction compounds. It’s not zero per use. It’s something per use. And something per use, across thousands of uses, is a lot.

This is the argument for tools that live where you already work. Not because they’re necessarily better at the core task. Because the adoption tax is lower. Because the tenth use is as easy as the first. Because your documents don’t move — you bring the intelligence to where the documents are.

I’ve been watching a specific workflow get automated by increasingly sophisticated tools. The tools are good. Some of them are very good.

But they all have a tenth login.

That’s the gap that remains. +++