Homegrown martech tools are making a comeback
There’s been a surge in homegrown martech tools in the past year, and AI is almost certainly the reason why.
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MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack Survey found nearly one-quarter of the tools and capabilities marketers plan to add to their stacks will be homegrown solutions.
While nearly 60% of those new tools will come from commercial vendors, this is a surprising turnaround.
Another survey, the 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey, which was conducted less than a year earlier, found homegrown solutions were on the verge of extinction.
More than 70% of Replacement Survey respondents said they replaced commercial tools with another commercial tool, while less than 10% replaced a commercial application with a homegrown solution.
What’s behind this re-emergence of homegrown martech applications? It’s likely AI. Artificial intelligence enables the “citizen developers” who create applications without deep coding knowledge or experience.
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Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet. Prior to joining Third Door Media as the Editorial Director of the MarTech website, he led demand generation at B2B media company TechnologyAdvice.
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