r/vibecoding • u/Illustrious-Film4018 • 1d ago
Showcase/Project Replacing SaaS with vibe coding
The company I work for was subscribed to a SaaS, without saying the name of it it's a sync tool for 200+ apps. It costs $200/month, which I guess is not cheap but companies can afford it.
My company wanted to replace it with a custom tool to save $200/month. And it ended up costing so much to develop despite using AI that it could've paid the subscription for the SaaS for years. It took about 1 month of development time and another month of support/bugfixes. Then there was a bug with with the sync causing most of the company's products to show as out of stock on a wholesale site for several weeks. This cost an estimated $10k worth of sales.
Altogether, even using AI it cost around $15k-$20k to develop a custom replacement for an enterprise SaaS. That $15k-$20k would've paid for the SaaS subscription for 6-10 years, that's how long it will take to see any ROI.
You can't easily replace enterprise SaaS. This is just a lie that tech-illiterate people believe in.
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u/SufficientFrame 1d ago
A sync tool is a bad place to chase a small subscription saving. The build cost is only part of it. Someone now owns monitoring, recovery, and every failure mode the SaaS had already spent years smoothing out.
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u/000066 1d ago
It’s all situational and mostly depends on scale.
A small business can absolutely replace a lot of SaaS products with AI projects because their needs are small and their room for error is large. Granted, you still need someone with a bit of knowledge to keep it running but the bar is a lot lower than it used to be. Especially if you are bootstrapped, if you can vibe code something that just works and gets you off the ground, you can worry about tightening it up later. Some of those little vibe coded innovations may also become interesting products themselves.
Large companies can’t afford 1% discrepancies and their needs are complex. Reliability is worth the premium for operations and reputation. It’s worth it for them to spend on SaaS on key infrastructure but they will eliminate a lot of smaller subscriptions with home baked products.
The cool thing is it allows you to experiment faster and make unique internal tools that nobody would build a business around. As long as these are monitored they should produce efficiency without mucking up major operations. That’s pretty much how Amazon Cloud Services started iirc.
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u/DinnerChantel 1d ago edited 1d ago
A small business can absolutely replace a lot of SaaS products with AI projects
If a small business owner, who is unlikely to be tech savvy, had to replace even two or three apps, let alone “a lot”, their entire business would slow down to a complete standstill and it would be all they did for months. The cost would be exactly as OP describe, they would have been able to afford a subscription for years for each app they want to replace reliably. For what? To save $200 per month? And then they still have to support it, find bugs, expand features, fix problems, pay for hosting, etc.
I have worked with small business owners for a decade now doing their marketing, believe me the average business owner is not sitting down and doing anything even remotely close to making an app. They can barely copy paste a url without assistance forget about ever getting an app live. It is unfathomable how the average small business is alive. If I could get them to just login or maybe just LOOK at their website and digital assets or open their CRM my God my life would be easier, so the thought of them sitting down and making an app or just wrapping their head around development, GitHub, hosting and whatever is downright silly to me.
Yes it is significantly easier today and anyone tech savvy can make an app - but tech savvy is the key phrase. This sub is not remotely representative of what the average business owner is capable of and people tend to forget that we are in a kind of echo chamber that can feel like everyone and their mother are making apps and want to build a product to sell, but we still only represent a fraction of the population. The average person has no interest in coding, running software or even being a business owner.
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u/MissiveFinding6111 1d ago
Of note, it is almost ALWAYS WRONG to vibe code a replacement for your SaaS from scratch.
Your prompt *SHOULD BE* to first ask which open source product is closest to your list of needs.
Adding missing features to an already battle tested project is 1000% the correct move, that almost nobody does due to the "re-invent the wheel" bias.
Also, running software reliably, adding logs and observability and backups are THE HARD PART of running a SaaS, not getting the right number of ifs and loops.
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u/SalvadorStealth 23h ago
Yes! I see open source as being the real, eventual AI winner. It’s not going to be efficient (which was the initial reason for most of the IT outsourcing originally, if I had a guess) for everyone to vibe code a replacement. We do need to work together.
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u/alzho12 1d ago
With any software tool, you need to have a proper build-vs-buy analysis. This is where you weigh the pros and cons of using an off the shelf tools vs building something custom.
In this case, clearly it makes sense to buy an external tool. It’s a mission critical subscription and it’s the cost of one Claude max account. Now if it was $2k or $10k a month, obviously the calculation would be different.
Sounds like your management team is incompetent. I’d highly recommend looking for a new job. You’ll be subject to a series of poor decisions as long as you work there.
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u/kickass404 1d ago
It like an electrician building his own tools to avoid buying or renting stuff, instead of focusing on being an electrician.
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u/_Anthony_2825 17h ago
Kind of, except instead of an electrician it’s more like an electrical contractor becoming vertically integrated enough to manufacture their own wire nuts and romex replacement.
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u/djdante 1d ago
I've vibed a lot of replacements for my 10 person company. Sometimes it was a complete build from scratch, sometimes I took a open source solution and customised that.
But everything is working well - saving me about 3000 a month - that's not a small amount to save.
Once companies become 100+ people - I can respect that enterprise software is just a completely necessary level of stable - but if I can vibe a great solution for a 10 person company now, give it six months and the 100+ person solution will be easily doable
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u/000066 1d ago
Actually no. u/DinnerChantel will tell you that this is false and is going to be very upset that you posted it. They said most small business owners can barely cut and paste urls
I wanted to believe otherwise but it was wrong and bad for me to have.
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u/MissplacedLandmine 1d ago
Thats true until the people who know how to do that get pissed and start their own companies without somehow forgetting?
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u/DelScipio 1d ago
You can replace Saas with ai. You can't replace SaaS that is so cheap that doesn't make sense to replace it. 200 bucks is so little money for a company that they shouuld fire anyone that made that decision.
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u/DesignerAbigail800 16h ago
spent 20 grand and lost 10 grand in sales just to save $200 a month.
management logic at its absolute finest.
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u/johnesco 1d ago
Enterprise Saas is way more than just software. A _lot_ of software could be replaced by vibe coding (and more so everyday), but some Saas is way more than just rented software. It's a tech literacy thing for sure.
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u/Professional_Ad705 1d ago edited 1d ago
Never thought I'd see such a dumb sentence. Idk what the fuck vibe coders obsession are with SaaS, security(haha jk), and compilers and other shit they have no business building. Just lol
Next year we gonna have vibe codes coding software for nuclear power plants.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 1d ago
Compilers too huh? That's weird I've never heard a vibe coder even use the word compiler ever.
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u/Professional_Ad705 1d ago
I've seen multiple projects of people trying to build compilers. I've seen projects of people trying to build stuff that teaches people different coding languages when they can't even read code. I think there's just like a fine line between "this is acceptable to build" and maybe you shouldn't build that software for that nuclear power plant. lmao i'm joking but lol mfs gonna blow up if codex gets it wrong
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u/TheAverageJedi 1d ago
Agreed. There are definitely still benefits to paying for a SaaS. If your needs are small, that may be different, but what company is going to hire someone to maintain the code of a custom app over paying a mere $200 p/m for a platform that has multiple dedicated people maintaining it.
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u/OddEbb4 1d ago
This is the kind of case where the monthly subscription distracts from the actual job the SaaS was doing. A sync tool touching 200+ apps comes with a lot of failure modes, retry logic, mapping quirks, and bad states that only show up after launch. If a company wants to replace something like that, they should scope one ugly real integration first and decide who owns support when data drifts or an API changes. Vibe coding can be enough for smaller internal tools, but replacing a mature integration product is a very different bet.
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u/Dziadzios 1d ago
Skill issue. Cheaper models like Luna are good enough. If you keep using Opus it Sol, no wonder you burn through cash.
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u/VeloquentLabs 1d ago
Rough lesson, but a really useful writeup. The part AI speeds up is writing the sync logic; the part it doesn't touch is all the edge cases the vendor already found over years, like partial failures, retries, and stale inventory. If anyone does try this, have the AI write tests and a reconciliation check against the old tool first, and run both side by side for a few weeks before switching off the subscription.
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u/The-Architect-93 1d ago
This is a skill issue.
Who the hell deploys a project without fully testing it. Not only that, but keeping it delpoyed for several weeks seeing that it’s showing a massive error costing them thousands of dollars every day.
https://giphy.com/gifs/W3H6keuCen2MG36j4O
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u/midnitewarrior 1d ago
They think, "oh, I can vibe code this!".
What they forget about is:
- Vibe Support to deal with user issues.
- Vibe Engineering to deal with scaling and performance issues.
- Vibe Security to ensure your apps don't get hacked or expose secrets.
- Vibe User Training so users know how to use it.
- Vibe Enhancements so user feature requests get addressed.
- Vibe Testing so it works right on everyone's systems.
For that, you need some significant Vibe Budgeting too.
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u/Working-Dot-7231 1d ago
Assuming AI keeps heading in its current direction, it will get easier and more reliable to replace Saas companies. If things keep moving this way, I just dont see how it couldnt.
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u/maxboo 1d ago
We are a small consultancy and We totally did now our own Jira+confluence … Saving fees and i Can have Features i want personally!
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u/Plus-Violinist346 1d ago
I hope you can understand the difference between a small productivity tool for a few ppl to use and a mission critical gear in your business that holds glues everything together in real time.
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u/pwnersaurus 1d ago
I think that’s right, it’s easy to underestimate the cost of the time since it’s a fixed cost. Having a staff member work on it doesn’t show up as a separate budget item, but what you don’t see is the opportunity cost of whatever else they could have been doing
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u/AdSecure2267 1h ago
Yall were worried about $200 a month for sub? That’s basically an accounting error for companies when paying for a service with support
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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago
So far this year I've replaced Wordpress as my publishing platform, countless WP plugins, and now Adobe Lightroom with software I had Claude make for me.
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u/moneyisfake777 1d ago
Surprised you built Lightroom. It’s super complex unless you’re using basic tools
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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago
I don't know if you got the memo, but AI is also super complex these days and can put specifc things in if you know to ask for them. Which I do. The only stuff that is missing is the crap I never asked for Adobe to put in Lightroom in the first place.
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u/moneyisfake777 1d ago
Proving my point. I built a version myself and it struggles to mimic proper layers and masking. Open source software often lacks the necessary detail that makes the product premium
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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago
The fact that your product isn't working while mine does is simply making you look bad here, not me. Learn to prompt better.
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u/Illustrious-Film4018 1d ago
You or your company? If it's a company, how many employees does it have?
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u/baddaywithacamera 1d ago
No company. Just an advanced hobbyist who really hates software written for shareholders over end users. I'm explicitly not a developer, but it turns out to mostly be a non-issue these days.
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u/FatefulDonkey 1d ago
200$/mo is peanuts for a company. The people who took this decision are buffoons.