https://saaswilldie.com/news/ Real posts from people replacing paid software with AI-built tools. en Sun, 08 Nov 2026 15:44:43 GMT https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-08-sendgrid-alternative-weekend-dkobia/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-08-sendgrid-alternative-weekend-dkobia/ Sun, 08 Nov 2026 15:44:43 GMT David Kobia ran into a broken support link at SendGrid, the email service from Twilio, and one weekend later had vibe coded an alternative for personal use. The lesson, in their words: friction in SaaS used to mean churn, but now it can mean someone builds your replacement before the weekend is over. No price tag was mentioned and the tool was built just for themselves, so this is a warning shot rather than a market takeover. Still, one broken link and one Sunday were all it took for a single customer to walk out of the vendor's gates. Original post by David Kobia: https://x.com/dkobia/status/2119456086633701548 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-07-five-subscriptions-cancelled-thehunterbohm/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-07-five-subscriptions-cancelled-thehunterbohm/ Sat, 07 Nov 2026 01:03:00 GMT Five subscriptions down in two weeks, about $134 a month gone. Hunter Bohm swapped Granola for a meeting recorder that transcribes on their own Mac, Willow Voice for Lip Service, their own open-source dictation app, Beehiiv for Marc Lou's self-hosted MailCheap, ElevenLabs for free voice models on their own GPU with no monthly cap, and Microsoft email for Cloudflare forwarding to Gmail. Hunter also posts the bill for the fight: the recorder lost 2 real calls before it got fixed, and the newsletter app needed 3 security fixes before 4,289 readers could move onto it. Five tombstones, with honest notes on the battle. Saving, as stated: about $134 a month. Original post by Hunter Bohm: https://x.com/TheHunterBohm/status/2118871808774643838 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-crm-built-in-hours-kacphl/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-crm-built-in-hours-kacphl/ Fri, 06 Nov 2026 23:33:53 GMT Kelly C. won't say SaaS is dead, but the numbers do the talking. Kelly had spent hours researching and pricing CRMs, then built a half-decent one in about as many hours. The next day it went into the team's workflow, complete with a Gmail add-on and a LinkedIn extension. The shopping trip took as long as the build, and only the build left the team with something they own. Another CRM vendor just lost a deal it never knew it was in, picked off by the time it took to read its own pricing page. Original post by Kelly C.: https://x.com/kacphl/status/2118849379545362444 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-carta-zapier-claude-max-noahkagan/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-carta-zapier-claude-max-noahkagan/ Fri, 06 Nov 2026 21:02:04 GMT Two more subscriptions fall to the horde. Noah Kagan says Carta, at $11K a year, was replaced overnight. Zapier, at $4,788 a year, went to $0 once Claude rebuilt the two of his 123 automations that were doing 88% of the work. Add it up and $15,788 a year of software got swapped for $2,400 a year of Claude Max, and Noah counts the productivity gains as the bigger win. The catch is one he spots himself: there's no way that $200 a month price holds. Even the zombie army has a landlord, and the landlord can raise the rent. Saving, as stated: $15,788 a year of software replaced by $2,400 a year of Claude. Original post by Noah Kagan: https://x.com/noahkagan/status/2118811174108061841 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-construction-software-cancelled-puvsandhu/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-construction-software-cancelled-puvsandhu/ Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:34:05 GMT Pawan was paying around $1,700 a month for construction management software, mostly for estimating, bills, job cost tracking and warranty items, and barely touched its scheduling tools. An early attempt to vibe-code a full clone in Replit died on the vine because it looked like too much to maintain. Then Pawan set up Grok Bot staff for each company and asked them to rebuild the estimate and job cost tracker, wired straight into QuickBooks, email and OneDrive. That also ended the bookkeeper's habit of entering every bill twice. A couple of days later the subscription was cancelled, and the bots now assemble bank draw packages too. One more vendor buried under a pile of spreadsheets. Saving, as stated: $20K a year. Original post by Pawan: https://x.com/puvsandhu/status/2118713535211450817 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-own-crm-build-vs-buy-gamalinosqui/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-06-own-crm-build-vs-buy-gamalinosqui/ Fri, 06 Nov 2026 14:13:00 GMT Not every survivor story ends with a clean kill. At Kodus, Gabe's team used AI to build their own CRM, growth tools, prospecting automations and AI visibility tracking. They're saving on subscriptions, though not really on tokens, and Gabe keeps ending up debugging a CRM integration or a broken automation instead of building the actual product. After 14 years of internal tools, most of them abandoned, Gabe's verdict is that building got cheap but owning didn't. The warning cuts both ways, though: if a weekend of prompts can copy your SaaS and nothing else protects it, the horde is already at the gate. Original post by Gabe from Kodus: https://x.com/gamalinosqui/status/2118708230075634167 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-pms-crm-zapier-build-mossxtazi/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-pms-crm-zapier-build-mossxtazi/ Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:32:19 GMT Vertical SaaS just took a $50k hit on one island. Moss, founder of Domus Aedes, says the whole software bill is now about $500 a month and all of it is AI. This year the horde cancelled a $25k/yr property management suite, an $8k/yr CRM, plus Canva, Zapier, Make and the rest — then built what they needed instead. Moss is even thinking about open-sourcing the new PMS so other operators can skip the bill too. The post's closing shot: vertical SaaS that charges millions for software AI can make is in serious trouble. Saving, as stated: $50k+ a year. Original post by Moss: https://x.com/MossxTazi/status/2118320505476276333 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-workout-app-replaced-jorgemenadev/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-workout-app-replaced-jorgemenadev/ Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:30:06 GMT Jorge Mena was paying $99 a year for a workout app, so he built his own and called it Fitbite. It started with recipes: his most-cooked meals, their macros, and a one-tap shopping list that adds up shared ingredients and can be shared with his wife. Then the workouts moved in and the subscription got cancelled. The newest feature fixes a gym-floor annoyance: when the machine you need is taken, you swap the exercise mid-workout and it loads the weights you lifted last time. A paid fitness app benched by a one-person product team, built for exactly one user. Saving, as stated: $99 a year. Original post by Jorge Mena: https://x.com/JorgeMenaDev/status/2118319947172417553 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-voluum-tracker-vibe-coded-fafafuf/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-05-voluum-tracker-vibe-coded-fafafuf/ Thu, 05 Nov 2026 06:22:48 GMT Another ad tracker bites the dust. Fafa was renting Voluum, vibe-coded a replacement in a few hours, and now keeps a few hundred dollars a month plus sole custody of the data. The new tool does exactly what Fafa needs — no more paying a generic SaaS to watch campaigns. Short, sharp, and a clean RIP SaaS send-off from someone who decided owning the tracker beats leasing it. Saving, as stated: a few hundred dollars a month. Original post by Fafa: https://x.com/Fafafuf/status/2118227512371064876 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-04-five-apps-replaced-with-claude-federicodonaton/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-04-five-apps-replaced-with-claude-federicodonaton/ Wed, 04 Nov 2026 11:00:20 GMT A five-app wipe in one wave. Federico Donatone, CEO of GrowthCab, says Claude has been replacing apps they used to pay 20K$/year for, and making them better and tailored to their vision along the way. First to fall: Wispr Flow, Superhuman, Notion, Granola and Calendly. The twist is that money wasn't the trigger here. Federico admits those five were cheap and replaced them anyway, because they weren't fully meeting their needs and there was room to improve them. The rest of the hit list sits in Federico's own market, so those names stay classified for now. Original post by Federico Donatone 👽: https://x.com/federicodonaton/status/2117934966575161645 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-04-dad-replaced-quickbooks-0xdesigner/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-04-dad-replaced-quickbooks-0xdesigner/ Wed, 04 Nov 2026 07:01:47 GMT Patient zero this time is a dad. 0xDesigner says their father, who isn't tech savvy and quits the moment something doesn't work, replaced QuickBooks with Codex a few weeks ago. If he can make his own software, anyone can, so yes: SaaS is dead. But there's a twist from the survivors' camp. Plenty of AI-pilled friends who have vibe-coded dozens of their own apps still switched to 0xDesigner's food tracker. The metaphor: apps are restaurants. Cooking at home is cheaper, but sometimes you're too lazy, and sometimes eating out is better. Original post by 0xDesigner: https://x.com/0xDesigner/status/2117874933766177000 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-short-lived-software-adocomplete/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-short-lived-software-adocomplete/ Tue, 03 Nov 2026 17:59:04 GMT A plot twist in the zombie playbook. Ado used to think personal software built with AI meant everyone building their own Figma, Linear or video editor. Now Ado thinks that's wrong. The likelier future is short-lived, purpose-built software for the task at hand, with a single data store holding the source of truth, outcomes and output, especially as models get faster and better. In game terms, the horde doesn't rebuild the castle, it summons a weapon for one wave and drops it. The advice to builders: build for interoperability. Original post by Ado: https://x.com/adocomplete/status/2117677958450319541 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-self-maintaining-personal-software-rileybrown/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-self-maintaining-personal-software-rileybrown/ Tue, 03 Nov 2026 16:32:48 GMT Riley Brown has no patience for the idea that vibe coders babysitting their own apps is silly. The pitch: GPT Sites ships auth, a database, storage and hosting, so you build your site and then prompt it to keep itself secure and maintained every day. Personal software that maintains itself. Riley's case against the SaaS castle is about priorities: SaaS companies maintain software for their current and future pool of users and their business model, not for you. And this isn't just an X bubble, Riley says. The most normie of normies are already building and using their own software, and we're only in inning 2 of 9. Original post by Riley Brown: https://x.com/rileybrown/status/2117656246685762039 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-rubymine-own-ide-sachintwtss/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-rubymine-own-ide-sachintwtss/ Tue, 03 Nov 2026 10:13:08 GMT Another paid seat falls to the horde. Sachin got tired of paying for RubyMine, so they built their own: Garnet, a free, open-source Ruby and Rails IDE for macOS. It's written in Rust with Tauri, launches in about a second and uses around 130 MB of RAM. No account, no subscription, no telemetry. For a JetBrains IDE that's a direct shot at the licence fee, and the code is out in the open for any Rails developer who wants to stop paying rent on their editor. Original post by Sachin: https://x.com/sachintwtss/status/2117560702139617509 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-willow-dictation-own-build-thehunterbohm/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-03-willow-dictation-own-build-thehunterbohm/ Tue, 03 Nov 2026 00:42:09 GMT Another monthly toll gets knocked down. Hunter Bohm was paying Willow $15 a month to type what they say, so Hunter built a dictation app of their own: free, open source, and your voice stays on your Mac. Hold a key, talk, let go. Hunter clocks the new build typing your words in 0.21 seconds against Willow's 0.37. It also goes past plain dictation: one key combo has Claude Code write your reply, another hands the task straight to your agent. A subscription tool turned into a weapon the survivor owns outright. Saving, as stated: $15 a month. Original post by Hunter Bohm: https://x.com/TheHunterBohm/status/2117417008795103387 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-tradingview-terminal-builderjaydub/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-tradingview-terminal-builderjaydub/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 19:27:31 GMT TradingView just lost another seat to a custom build. JW (jay,dub), founder at Heurist AI, got tired of trading apps designed to grab attention and push over-trading. So JW vibe-coded a personal terminal with custom layouts, watchlists, and only the indicators that matter — moving averages, Fibs, sigma levels. No casino UX. Just the right amount of information for the work. Bye TradingView. Original post by JW (jay,dub): https://x.com/builderjaydub/status/2117337829063921809 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-people-can-cook-samuelrdt/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-people-can-cook-samuelrdt/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 16:45:18 GMT Not everyone is writing obituaries. Samuel Rondot takes the most popular argument of the AI zombie apocalypse, that customers will just vibe-code their own tools, and answers it with a kitchen. People can cook, and restaurants still exist. It's the rallying cry of the SaaS survivors barricading the doors: being able to build something yourself doesn't mean you want to. Whether the restaurants survive the horde is the fight this whole game is about. Original post by Samuel Rondot: https://x.com/samuelrdt/status/2117297005529555365 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-600-saas-in-house-czue/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-02-600-saas-in-house-czue/ Mon, 02 Nov 2026 09:08:42 GMT Cory Zue just put another subscription on the obituary page: a $600/year SaaS, cancelled in favour of an in-house alternative coded with Opus. The bigger headline is what's left standing. Cory's outside spend is now only infrastructure: servers, email and payments. Everything else in the stack has already been eaten by the horde. Cory's verdict is blunt: niche B2B SaaS is in real trouble. If you're a small B2B tool hiding on the island, that's the sound of the zombies reaching the shore. Saving, as stated: $600/year. Original post by Cory Zue: https://x.com/czue/status/2117182098003886169 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-01-webflow-framer-claude-edits-rileycx/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-11-01-webflow-framer-claude-edits-rileycx/ Sun, 01 Nov 2026 14:44:42 GMT Riley Hennigh's agency used to build every site in Webflow or Framer, because those were supposed to be easier for marketers to maintain, and the advice was to keep a Webflow or Framer developer on retainer forever. Then one client went with a site built in code. Their marketing team had never touched code, yet since launch they have replaced the hero animation and added pages from templated sections, just by describing what they wanted to Claude. Riley says it looks as good as the agency's own work. The catch: it only works because the designers put the design rules in the code, so the agent sticks to the type styles and colors that exist. The no-code platforms' favourite argument, easy maintenance, just took a hit. Original post by Riley Hennigh: https://x.com/rileycx/status/2116904268238041372 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-31-zoom-webinars-own-build-ryanduncan/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-31-zoom-webinars-own-build-ryanduncan/ Sat, 31 Oct 2026 08:06:06 GMT Zoom webinars just got CSAS'd. Ryan Duncan vibe-coded a custom webinar stack, ran a real session through it, and says friends thought it was crazy — until the site pushed $24k in sales in a week. Ryan calls the pattern Custom Software as a Service: build your own, actually use it. One more rented webinar room that didn't survive contact with a founder who can ship. Original post by Ryan Duncan: https://x.com/ryanduncan/status/2116441568148439531 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-beehiiv-debate-personal-software-therealdanvega/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-beehiiv-debate-personal-software-therealdanvega/ Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:44:25 GMT Dan Vega weighed in on the Beehiiv debate with a fair point for both sides. You can't vibe-code Beehiiv over a weekend, he says, and Tyler Denk is right about that. But most of us only use a small slice of the tools we pay for. That's his case that the age of personal software is here, written up in a longer article on X. It may be the most honest framing of the whole war: a SaaS doesn't have to be cloned completely to lose a customer. The customer only needs to clone their slice. Original post by Dan Vega: https://x.com/therealdanvega/status/2116164323869421883 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-fourteen-subscriptions-4200-densancar/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-fourteen-subscriptions-4200-densancar/ Fri, 30 Oct 2026 11:46:22 GMT Deniz Sancar is back with a body-count update. Over two weekends, 14 subscriptions have now been cancelled and replaced: GoHighLevel, Kit, Zoom, Loom, Calendly, Repurpose.io, Hyros, Lickd, ElevenLabs and iclosed from round one, plus Trello, DocuSign, Frame.io and Notion. Still standing: Claude Code, the Virlo API, Google Workspace and Cloudflare. The estimated saving rose to around £4,200 a year, with every tool replaced by an internal custom solution that he says fits his needs better. Wave two cleared, and the closing question got louder: maybe this really is the end for software? Saving, as stated: about £4,200 a year. Original post by Deniz Sancar: https://x.com/densancar/status/2116134613697347656 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-software-only-cheaper-thing-nico-jeannen/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-software-only-cheaper-thing-nico-jeannen/ Fri, 30 Oct 2026 03:02:05 GMT Nico Jeannen thinks most people haven't noticed how hard the SaaS market has been hit, and lays out three forces arriving at once. AI makes developers more productive, so software costs less to build, which means more competitors and lower prices. On top of that, Nico describes stagflation pushing up the cost of almost everything, and higher interest rates meaning less investment and fewer VCs throwing money around. Add it up and everything gets more expensive except software, and tight budgets give people even more reason to hunt for cheaper options or vibe code their own. The verdict for the SaaS side of the war: it's so over, though anyone who plays their cards well might find it's so back. Original post by Nico: https://x.com/nico_jeannen/status/2116002673468313911 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-email-open-tracking-mcp-headlessfounder/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-30-email-open-tracking-mcp-headlessfounder/ Fri, 30 Oct 2026 02:48:42 GMT Lucas Duval got tired of paying for email open tracking, so he built his own and open-sourced it. MailTrackMCP runs on Cloudflare Workers and ships with an MCP server, so his agent simply tells him who opened what, and the Cloudflare free tier covers it. Email tracking has long been a thin feature sold as a subscription: a pixel and a dashboard. Swap the dashboard for an agent and the hosting for a Worker, and the whole product fits in a repo. Another small SaaS, quietly headshot. Original post by Lucas Duval: https://x.com/HeadlessFounder/status/2115999306683469830 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-client-crm-whatsapp-bug-louiemota88/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-client-crm-whatsapp-bug-louiemota88/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 20:04:54 GMT Louie Mota built his own CRM for clients instead of paying for one. The lesson came from a bug: every WhatsApp reply he sent created a new contact. A review pass caught it, and merging the duplicates took the list from 362 contacts back down to 245. His conclusion is that a SaaS wouldn't have let him fix that in an afternoon. That's the whole trade in one story. Your own software has your own bugs, but you also own the fix. When this zombie breaks, it patches itself. Original post by Louie Mota: https://x.com/LouieMota88/status/2115897688117911605 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-open-genjutsu-matchaman11/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-open-genjutsu-matchaman11/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 13:33:20 GMT Anil Chandra Naidu Matcha says everyone is paying $150 a month just to clone videos, which he puts at $2,000 a year, forever. Too expensive, so he built Open-Genjutsu, a free, open-source alternative to the Genjutsu apps, with the repo on GitHub. His pitch: clone any video, with no subscriptions, no lock-in, no limits and no markups. It's the open-source wave in action. One builder gets annoyed, and every other customer of that tool gets a free option. The subscription respawn timer just got a lot longer. Saving, as stated: $150/month (about $2,000 a year). Original post by Anil Chandra Naidu Matcha: https://x.com/matchaman11/status/2115799143113531619 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-two-week-saas-purge-125k-rchase/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-two-week-saas-purge-125k-rchase/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 13:04:34 GMT Reilly Chase says his cost-cutting has reached $125,000 a year so far, and he's not done. In two weeks: Aircall swapped for Quo ($600 a month), Intercom moving to Crisp ($700 a month, with 48,000 tickets being migrated), Front swapped for Spark ($87), a paid SSH client dropped to its free tier ($324), a $60 social posting app replaced by his AI agent, a $250 payment-reminder tool swapped for Stripe's built-in emails, a $39 Shopify plan replaced by his own merch store, and $257 a month of unneeded Google Ads found. Not every kill was a rebuild, but it's a full clear. Saving, as stated: $125,000 a year so far, by his count. Original post by Reilly Chase: https://x.com/rchase/status/2115791905187340304 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-webflow-portfolio-claude-code-danlimonchik/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-29-webflow-portfolio-claude-code-danlimonchik/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 12:11:04 GMT Dan Limonchik cancelled his Webflow account and rebuilt his entire portfolio with Claude Code, for $0. Using a skill from Adam Perlis, he migrated the site 1:1 and improved its speed, SEO and structure, all in less than a day. Website builders are one of the softest targets in this war: a portfolio is mostly static pages, and AI agents are very good at static pages. Webflow keeps showing up in the obituary column, and this time the casualty report came with a faster site. Saving, as stated: the Webflow plan, rebuilt for $0. Original post by Dan Limonchik: https://x.com/DanLimonchik/status/2115778441152807388 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-hubspot-after-10-years-louis-blythe/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-hubspot-after-10-years-louis-blythe/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 22:26:33 GMT Louis Blythe's team cancelled HubSpot after ten years. The complaint is a familiar one in this war: the tool turned into a kitchen sink of features, too busy for a small team, because bigger tools chase bigger customers. Louis sums it up as paying for 400 features and using 20. So the team built their own, and it took two weeks. The replacement does exactly what they need and nothing else. Losing a ten-year customer hurts any SaaS, and this one didn't walk over to a competitor. It built one. Original post by Louis Blythe: https://x.com/louis_blythe_/status/2115570944525926426 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-cancelled-senja-testimonials-amascreates/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-cancelled-senja-testimonials-amascreates/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 16:40:44 GMT Ahmad Mas cancelled his Senja subscription and moved testimonials into SaaSykit. Why pay a monthly fee for a feature he could build with Claude in 10 minutes? So he built it, and imported all his testimonials to host on SaaSykit. He's careful to say it's nothing against Senja, but he has a warning for every SaaS: if you're not deeply integrated into your customers' workflows, you'd better start thinking about what makes you worth paying for. Single-feature SaaS is the slowest zombie in the pack, and the first to get caught. Original post by Ahmad Mas: https://x.com/AmasCreates/status/2115483916270236042 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-elementor-pmpro-wordpress-travisbiziorek/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-elementor-pmpro-wordpress-travisbiziorek/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 14:31:48 GMT Travis Biziorek killed his Elementor subscription with a vibe-coded custom design for his personal blog, then killed PMPro after vibe-coding his own custom plugin. He says that if he could bet against the entire economy built around the WordPress ecosystem, he'd take out a second mortgage to do it. Premium plugin providers and theme marketplaces, in his words, are absolutely cooked, and he thinks this is coming for every industry. WordPress plugins were always small, focused tools. That makes them perfect zombie snacks. Original post by Travis Biziorek: https://x.com/TravisBiziorek/status/2115451469969449449 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-asana-agent-task-tracker-uglyrobot/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-asana-agent-task-tracker-uglyrobot/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 13:52:27 GMT Aaron Edwards points out that Asana has MCP, so AI agents can work with it, but it still wasn't worth paying for something that simple when the team barely uses the interface. So they vibe-coded their own team task tracker, built with SSO and MCP first. Their CRM was built the same way, for the same reason. It's a new kind of threat for the SaaS horde: if agents are doing the work, the tool doesn't need to be a product. A polished UI is a weak barricade when nobody is looking at it. Original post by Aaron Edwards: https://x.com/uglyrobot/status/2115441566110134579 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-server-guy-2k-month-kylegawley/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-server-guy-2k-month-kylegawley/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 07:01:00 GMT Kyle Gawley replaced all his SaaS tools with vibe-coded open-source alternatives. Then he had to hire a server guy to maintain them for $2k a month. But he's saving $150 a month. It's another satirical jab from the creator of DataSlop, and the hidden cost it points at is real: self-hosting means updates, backups and someone on call when it breaks. SaaS sells maintenance as much as software. Zombies who forget that end up paying for it anyway, with a different name on the invoice. Original post by Kyle Gawley: https://x.com/kylegawley/status/2115338023655346458 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-email-platform-on-ses-mcp-ultralinx/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-email-platform-on-ses-mcp-ultralinx/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 06:48:29 GMT Oliur's team sends around 100k to 200k emails a month, and they built their own email platform on top of Amazon SES to do it. The motivation was full MCP support, so anyone on the team can manage emails, automations and lists without ever logging into a dashboard. That's a new reason to leave a SaaS. Not price, not features, but the interface itself. When your team talks to an agent instead of clicking around, the dashboard is the part you pay for and never use. Email marketing tools take another hit. Original post by Oliur: https://x.com/UltraLinx/status/2115334874081141138 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-open-source-code-review-junead-kh/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-28-open-source-code-review-junead-kh/ Wed, 28 Oct 2026 02:10:33 GMT Junead Khan considered paying for Greptile or CodeRabbit, then built his own code-review pipeline instead, and open-sourced it as openreviewkit. It's the one he uses for Treasury: it runs on your Claude Code subscription, does multiple review and verification passes, and he reports 79% recall on bugs in their repo. Free and open source. AI code review is a young category, and it's already being cloned by its own customers. The tools that review the zombies' code now have zombies of their own. Original post by Junead Khan: https://x.com/junead_kh/status/2115264929343398384 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-geo-tracking-tool-ryanjones/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-geo-tracking-tool-ryanjones/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 15:21:04 GMT Ryan Jones got tired of paying huge fees for GEO tracking on smaller sites, so he built his own tool, freesov.com, where you bring your own API key. GEO, tracking how AI search engines talk about your site, is one of the newest SaaS categories around, and it's already being rebuilt by its customers. Bring-your-own-key is the zombie's favourite pricing model: the tool takes your key, and you pay the AI provider directly for what you actually use. Another young category, already under siege. Original post by Ryan Jones: https://x.com/RyanJones/status/2115101482433262053 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-smartlead-cold-mailer-bekamakhar/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-smartlead-cold-mailer-bekamakhar/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:39:35 GMT Beka Makharoblishvili swapped a $100/month Smartlead plan for a cold mailer built in one day. It runs for free on their Mac, and Claude filters the leads. It's still being tested, but it's already sending. Beka isn't ready to declare SaaS dead, and simply says they end up building their own tools most of the time. Maybe that's the quiet version of the zombie apocalypse: no grand obituary, just one more subscription that never gets renewed because a one-day build does the job. Saving, as stated: $100/month. Original post by Beka Makharoblishvili: https://x.com/bekamakhar/status/2115075943140307390 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-photoshop-to-open-source-suganthan/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-27-photoshop-to-open-source-suganthan/ Tue, 27 Oct 2026 07:20:11 GMT Suganthan Mohanadasan cancelled his Adobe Photoshop subscription and installed Photocraft, a free, open-source alternative. His review in three lines: it looks familiar, does what he needs, and costs absolutely nothing. And the joke that isn't really a joke: at this rate, his entire software subscription budget is going to be replaced by GitHub repos. This is the other way the wave spreads. Not everyone builds their own; plenty just download the clone someone else built. One builder's repo can cancel a lot of subscriptions. Original post by Suganthan Mohanadasan: https://x.com/suganthan/status/2114980463781757228 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-webflow-figma-slack-one-week-matteopelleg/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-webflow-figma-slack-one-week-matteopelleg/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:14:00 GMT Matteo Pellegrini's post is short enough to fit on a tombstone: in the last week he cancelled Webflow, Figma and Slack. 'AI is eating the world.' He doesn't say what replaced them or what it saves, so we won't make it up. But the list is the story. A website builder, a design tool and a team chat app are three categories with three different moats, and they all fell in the same week. That's not a skirmish. That's a wave clearing the map. Original post by Matteo Pellegrini: https://x.com/matteopelleg/status/2114722214524461410 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-shopify-to-laravel-from-iphone-rchase/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-shopify-to-laravel-from-iphone-rchase/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:01:29 GMT Reilly Chase replaced his $39-a-month Shopify bill with his own Laravel PHP app, built in a few hours by prompting Cursor from his iPhone. It's a fully functional store with Stripe and Apple Pay, backend order fulfilment and a Shippo integration for shipping labels. He even says the design looks better than the custom Shopify theme he once paid a developer to make. E-commerce platforms sold the idea that a store is too hard to build yourself. This one was built from a phone. Saving, as stated: $39/month. Original post by Reilly Chase: https://x.com/rchase/status/2114719067474919636 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-dataslop-parody-kylegawley/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-dataslop-parody-kylegawley/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 07:01:00 GMT Kyle Gawley introduces DataSlop: paying $3 a month for DataFast was 'too expensive', so he built an open-source alternative. It has been running for a week and says his top traffic source is localhost. It's a parody of the 'I rebuilt it to save money' posts filling the timeline, and it's funny because it's close enough to true. Analytics looks simple until you have to filter out your own traffic. The zombie version works, it just mostly counts itself. Original post by Kyle Gawley: https://x.com/kylegawley/status/2114613248268054624 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-screen-recorder-1500-tokens-om-patel5/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-screen-recorder-1500-tokens-om-patel5/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 02:55:09 GMT Om Patel didn't want to spend $9 a month on a MacBook screen recording tool, so he built one. The receipt: a Claude Code Max plan at $280 a month, about $1,500 worth of tokens burned inside that subscription, and roughly 24 hours of his time. It works. Was it worth it? 'I guess so... lol.' It's the most honest entry in the obituary column, and a useful reminder that building your own isn't always the cheaper path. Sometimes the zombie spends more ammo than the SaaS ever cost. Original post by Om Patel: https://x.com/om_patel5/status/2114551377234133434 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-claude-driven-video-editor-sankalpdomore/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-claude-driven-video-editor-sankalpdomore/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 02:30:00 GMT Sankalp Sinha is back with an update on his Descript breakup. He was paying $29 a month and still editing every reel by hand, so he built an editor that Claude can drive. It sees his videos, cuts them, and changes captions and styling on request, all on the Claude Max plan he already pays for. Now he's thinking of releasing it as a one-time purchase that runs on the buyer's own Claude or Codex subscription. The zombie, it turns out, also has a pricing page. Saving, as stated: $29/month. Original post by Sankalp Sinha (Left $15K+ MRR job to indiehack): https://x.com/sankalpdomore/status/2114545047035388376 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-open-post-bridge-alternative-brainstormity/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-26-open-post-bridge-alternative-brainstormity/ Mon, 26 Oct 2026 02:19:16 GMT brainstormity found $99 a month for Post Bridge getting a little too expensive, so they built Open Post, an open-source alternative that posts to all their social media accounts from one dashboard and costs less than $1 a month to run. The GitHub release was planned once every integration is tested. Unusually polite for a zombie, they say it isn't about taking business from the original, and recommend it if you'd rather pay $40-$100 a month for a ready-to-use tool. Everyone else gets the self-hosted version for free. Saving, as stated: $99/month down to under $1/month. Original post by brainstormity: https://x.com/brainstormity/status/2114542346364711345 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-saas-prices-going-down-theandreboso/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-saas-prices-going-down-theandreboso/ Sun, 25 Oct 2026 09:30:35 GMT Andrea Bosoni predicted last year that SaaS prices would go down, and says it's finally happening. Every week someone posts that they were tired of paying for a tool, rebuilt it, and now sell it cheap, from analytics to email marketing to search ranking tools. His sharpest point: for established products the real danger isn't customers vibe-coding their own. It's other founders launching cheap copycats. The zombie threat has two heads: the customer who builds, and the indie hacker who builds and sells. Original post by Andrea Bosoni: https://x.com/theandreboso/status/2114288505023062490 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-cancelled-ynab-after-10-years-finereli/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-cancelled-ynab-after-10-years-finereli/ Sun, 25 Oct 2026 07:01:08 GMT Eli Finer just cancelled YNAB after more than 10 years. He admits budgeting software is complex and hard to get right, but he built his own, to his needs, and he's happy to maintain it. He thinks there's still room for paid software, but using anything he can't change with a prompt, or connect to over MCP for analysis and bulk updates, now feels incredibly anachronistic. And owning something as important as his money tools matters to him too. A decade of loyalty, ended at a prompt box. Original post by Eli Finer: https://x.com/finereli/status/2114250891771494464 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-cancelled-datafast-vibe-coded-aaron-bzrgain/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-25-cancelled-datafast-vibe-coded-aaron-bzrgain/ Sun, 25 Oct 2026 06:16:30 GMT aaron cancelled DataFast this week. After all the Beehiiv drama, the thought was simple: why not vibe-code my own? In aaron's view you can build your own version in about 10 minutes and plug it into data you already have, so it gives more complete insights than just traffic and revenue. The point isn't only saving $500 to $1,000 a year, the post says. It's getting something better. One drama spawned the next cancellation. That's how zombie outbreaks spread. Saving, as stated: $500-$1,000 a year. Original post by aaron: https://x.com/aaron_bzrgain/status/2114239662932038004 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-24-calendly-two-emails-zazencodes/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-24-calendly-two-emails-zazencodes/ Sat, 24 Oct 2026 15:38:00 GMT Calendly wouldn't let ZazenCodes sync two email accounts for free, so they built their own in about three hours. The first prompt went out from a phone on a walk in the park, and the build finished from the couch in front of the TV, while Codex worked on a laptop sitting on the lock screen. It used the gcloud CLI and Chrome to set up Google Cloud, deployed to Cloudflare on a subdomain and even created the DNS records. 'RIP SaaS,' they say. Calendly charged for a second email. The zombie charged for a stroll. Original post by ZazenCodes: https://x.com/ZazenCodes/status/2114018578655584514 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-24-mac-dictation-6-cents-sproutmed/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-24-mac-dictation-6-cents-sproutmed/ Sat, 24 Oct 2026 10:45:47 GMT Instead of paying for another subscription, Dirk Lauf built his own dictation tool for his Mac, doing exactly what he needs and nothing else. This week he dictated 28,525 words at 124 words a minute, which by the tool's own count saved about eight hours of typing. The bill for the whole month so far: 6 cents. His takeaway is that when what you need is narrow, building it yourself is often cheaper than subscribing. Dictation apps sell broad features. This one serves an audience of one. Saving, as stated: 6 cents for the month. Original post by Dirk Lauf: https://x.com/sproutmed/status/2113945042003877954 https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-23-four-internal-tools-distribution-arthuryuzbashev/ https://saaswilldie.com/news/2026-10-23-four-internal-tools-distribution-arthuryuzbashev/ Fri, 23 Oct 2026 23:14:19 GMT Arthur built four internal tools this month that he used to pay for, in a few evenings with Claude. His warning to founders: if he can do that, so can their customers, and their competitors. Features aren't a moat anymore, he says, and neither is price. What's left is distribution. The founder who knows where their users hang out wins, and the one who only builds gets copied. AI made building easy, but it didn't make marketing free. Even zombies have to go find the brains. Original post by Arthur: https://x.com/arthuryuzbashev/status/2113771025317941696