Your Franchise Agency’s Stack Is Not Your Infrastructure

TECH & INFRASTRUCTURE · APRIL 2026

Curating software isn’t the same as building it. In 2026, that distinction is the difference between running a franchise network and renting one.

There is a particular kind of franchise agency blog that goes something like this. “The tech landscape keeps moving. We’ve hunted, we’ve curated, and here are three platforms we really like.” The implication is that the agency is your tech partner.

The reality is a bit different. Curating software isn’t the same as building it. One is infrastructure. The other is affiliate marketing with a nicer logo.

In 2026, with SaaS M&A at record volume, the average company running 106 apps, and AI rewriting every vendor roadmap, that distinction has gone from semantic to commercial. If your agency’s entire “tech offer” is a shortlist of third-party tools they recommend, they are not your technology partner. They are your referral agent. And there is a difference.

The other difference is who pays. Curator agencies typically earn referral fees, revenue shares or partner commissions from the SaaS vendors they recommend. The vendor pays the agency to route you. Your retainer pays for the advice. That is two revenue streams on one relationship, and they do not always pull in the same direction.

The Curator Model, Explained Quickly

Here’s how it actually works. A franchise agency signs a partner agreement with a third-party SaaS vendor. The vendor pays a referral fee, a revenue share, or a reseller margin. The agency builds a “software house” page, writes a warm blog post about the tool, and tells clients it has been “carefully vetted.”

There is nothing inherently wrong with that model. It’s a legitimate service. Someone has to sort signal from noise, and the SaaS landscape is noisy. Three decent recommendations is better than none.

The problem is when agencies dress curation up as infrastructure. When a blog post about three partner platforms gets positioned as evidence of a technology capability. When a consultancy with zero software engineers calls its partner list a “Software House” and hopes nobody notices the distinction.

“The UK franchise space is full of consultancies that have discovered they can call themselves tech partners without having to build any tech.”

One piece doing the rounds this month is a textbook example. A long-established UK franchise consultancy published a post titled “the tech landscape keeps moving, here’s how we can help you keep up.” Three platforms were recommended — an AI agents bolt-on, an internal comms app (which the piece openly describes as “white-labelled entirely as your own app”), and a social listings dashboard.

Three good-sounding tools. None of them built by the agency. None of them owned by the agency. None of them roadmap-controlled by the agency. That is not a Software House. That is a partner list.

What The Data Says About Stack Sprawl

The average company now runs 106 SaaS applications. Enterprise SaaS spend averages $55.7M a year and rose 8% year-on-year into 2026, with most of the growth driven by AI-linked pricing volatility rather than net new adoption. In 2025 alone there were more than 2,600 SaaS merger and acquisition transactions. Industry analysts forecast that up to half of horizontal productivity apps will be acquired or pivot by the end of 2026.

Franchise networks are not immune to this. They’re more exposed than most, because their operational surface area is larger and their procurement discipline is usually smaller. The typical franchisor ends up with a stack that looks roughly like this.

A mid-sized UK franchisor typically runs separate tools for recruitment CRM, candidate scoring, marketing automation, internal comms, training and LMS, royalty collection, performance analytics, territory mapping, compliance tracking, document management, brand asset distribution, and franchisee support ticketing. That is a minimum of twelve vendors. Twelve contracts. Twelve roadmaps pointing in twelve different directions. Twelve potential acquisition events. And — if your agency has been “curating” — twelve referral relationships their advice is filtered through.

Every slot in that 94% is a pricing risk, an integration risk, and an acquisition risk. Every contract renewal is a potential repricing event. Every tool your agency “recommends” is another moving part in a stack they do not control.

The industry already knows this. One of the most widely read franchise operations guides of 2026 puts it bluntly.

A curated shortlist does not solve this. It makes it look more curated.

What Happens When Your Agency’s Pick Gets Acquired

Let’s run the scenario.

You take your agency’s advice and roll out a white-labelled comms platform across your network. You pay the license, you brand the login screen, you push 80 franchisees onto it. Training budget spent, operational content migrated, franchisee habits reformed.

Eighteen months later, the parent company is acquired. Pricing restructures. The free tier disappears. The UK data centre is consolidated into an overseas region. Support moves to a 12-hour time zone. The product roadmap, which used to prioritise small-network operators, suddenly prioritises US enterprise logos. The feature you rely on gets deprecated in the next quarterly release.

You raise it with the agency that recommended the tool. They send a sympathetic email and suggest a workshop to “explore alternatives.”

This is not a hypothetical risk. Microsoft announced 2026 price rises across Business Basic and Business Standard tiers. Slack pushed Business+ to $18 per user per month. Adobe’s acquisition of Figma reshaped pricing for thousands of product teams overnight. SaaS M&A hit record volume in 2025 and 2026 forecasts are higher still.

Or run the other scenario. The tool you adopted is fine. Great, even. Then a competing SaaS vendor signs a bigger partner agreement with your agency. Suddenly the “neutral recommendation” you get at the next tech audit skews toward the new partner. That is not malice — it is incentive alignment. But your pipeline economics do not care about your agency’s partner programme.

If your agency curated the tool, they carry none of that downside. You do.

Infrastructure vs Recommendation

The distinction is simple but it’s worth laying out side by side.

Two different businesses. Dressed up to look like the same one.

Here’s the awkward follow-on question. If an agency has no proprietary platform, where is their incentive actually pointing? The referral cheque comes from the SaaS vendor, not the franchisor. The agency’s paying commercial relationship is with the tool, not with the client.

That doesn’t make the advice automatically bad. But it does mean the agency is sitting between two parties with different interests, getting paid by one and advising the other. In most regulated industries that arrangement requires a disclosure. In franchise consulting it gets called a “free tech audit.”

Reframe the “tech audit” in plain English. An agency with partner relationships offers to assess your current tools and recommend replacements. The replacements they recommend happen to be tools they earn commission on. If a financial adviser did this they would need a licence. If a building surveyor did this they would need to declare the relationship. In franchise consulting it goes on the blog as thought leadership.

Where We Sit In All Of This

Full disclosure. SOOM uses third-party software. Every agency does. We run on Google Workspace, Slack, Notion, Xero, Figma, GitHub, Vercel, OpenAI and about thirty other tools. We’re not anti-SaaS.

What we don’t do is call a list of other people’s software our “Software House.”

The difference is KORE by SOOM® — our franchise recruitment and operations platform. It is custom-built, not white-labelled. It is not a CRM we rebranded. It is not a reseller license. It is not a partnership with a US enterprise tool reshaped for UK franchising.

We wrote the code. We own the roadmap. We carry the platform risk. When a client asks us to change something, we change it. When a client signs up, they don’t get the same stack as every other franchisor in our book — they get a command centre configured around their model, their pipeline, their economics. You can see that in how we built Jackson Fire & Security’s automated recruitment system — not a curated stack, a configured platform.

KORE runs a franchisor’s recruitment pipeline end-to-end — candidate capture, AI-led qualification calls, scoring, discovery day scheduling, franchisee onboarding, ongoing operations tracking. The modules are SOOM’s code. Pricing we control. Roadmap we own. If a client’s economics change, we change the platform. That answer is not available to any agency that does not write software.

That is the difference between recommending something and building something. It is not a small difference.

The Question Every Franchisor Should Ask

Next time an agency tells you they’re your tech partner, don’t ask what tools they recommend. Ask a different question.

“If this platform doubles in price next year, what is your answer?”

If the answer is “we’d review alternatives with you” — that’s a curator. They’ll run the same partner-shopping process again with a slightly different shortlist.

If the answer is “we’d change our product” — that’s an infrastructure partner. They have a product to change.

Only one of those answers is worth paying retainer fees for.

Infrastructure Is A Commercial Position, Not A Marketing One

The UK franchise industry has a quiet tolerance for consultancies that mistake partnerships for infrastructure. It’s been that way for a long time. The incumbents have had a comfortable run of it, mostly because franchisors have been too busy running networks to interrogate what their agency actually owns versus what it recommends.

That window is closing. SaaS is consolidating. Prices are volatile. AI is rewriting every vendor roadmap inside 18-month cycles. And the cost of a bad stack decision lands on the franchisor, not the agency that recommended it.

In that environment, the difference between the agency that recommends software and the agency that builds it stops being a marketing distinction and starts being a commercial one. One business has skin in the code. The other has skin in the referral fee.

Pick accordingly.

Further Reading From The SOOM Blog

This argument sits inside a wider conversation SOOM has been having about where franchise operations are actually heading. Three recent pieces reinforce the infrastructure case from different angles.

Stop Hiring, Start Automating. The hiring-vs-automation argument runs on the same logic as the curate-vs-build argument. Adding headcount to manage a sprawling curated stack is how franchise networks talk themselves into a cost base they cannot afford.

AI Will Redefine Franchise Head Offices By 2028. The curator model was built for a SaaS market that stood still long enough to evaluate. That market no longer exists. AI agents, native-AI SaaS and 18-month roadmap cycles are doing to franchise operations what the cloud did to on-premise software.

The Real Cost Of Slow Lead Response In Multi-Location Networks. The commercial proof of why infrastructure matters more than recommendation. When a candidate enquires, the cost of a 60-second reply versus a 24-hour reply is measured in signed franchisees, not abstract efficiency. A curated stack does not deliver that response time. A platform does.

KORE by SOOM® is the UK’s only custom-built franchise recruitment and operations platform, owned end-to-end by SOOM®. No partner licenses. No white-label. One roadmap, built for UK franchise networks.