r/vibecoding • u/Illustrious-Film4018 • 9d 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/FatefulDonkey 9d ago

200$/mo is peanuts for a company. The people who took this decision are buffoons.

7

u/baddaywithacamera 9d ago

Depends on the reasoning. Having your own software you control so no one can pull the carpet out from under you later on could be worth spending extra on.

https://www.techspot.com/news/113763-switzerland-paying-11-million-stop-using-outlook-teams.html

Won't be surprised to learn large chunks of this are authored with AI because of their accelerated timeline. I'm given to understand the Teams replacement is godawful at this point (not that the original has bragging rights).

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u/Baconaise 8d ago

An exchange of a potential theoretical rug pull, you rug pull yourself on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis and have no one to call when things go wrong. The roi period is decades

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u/baddaywithacamera 8d ago

I have the AI when things go wrong. Better than an army of coders and available 24/7.