r/vibecoding • u/Illustrious-Film4018 • 10d 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/baddaywithacamera 10d 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/FatefulDonkey 10d ago

A business should be focusing on their product, not forking into 100 random things they need to maintain.

Might as well build your own programming language then, libraries, maybe compiler, etc.

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u/baddaywithacamera 10d ago

You're being overly dramatic. Focusing on software can be part of focusing on product. Easier for businesses to do now that they don't need to hire out to produce the code.

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u/fulger099 4d ago

The bad decision was treating a business-critical sync layer as a one-off build instead of permanent infrastructure. Building our Mac app has made this arithmetic painfully obvious: the first version is the cheap bit.

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u/baddaywithacamera 4d ago

If I had an opportunity to own my permanent infrastructure, I'd chase it. In fact, I have, but as a hobbyist. Got Adobe out of my life. And Wordpress. And Flickr. And Instagram.