SaaS obituaries
Every day the AI zombie horde takes out another subscription. These are real posts from people who cancelled a paid tool and built their own, or found a free clone. Each one comes with our take, the original quote and a link to the source. Savings appear only as the author stated them.
Browse by tool: Beehiiv, Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, CRM software, Notion, Webflow, Calendly.
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David Kobia hit a broken support link and vibe coded a SendGrid alternative by Sunday night
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:…
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Hunter Bohm cancelled 5 subscriptions in two weeks with Claude Code, about $134 a month
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…
Saving, as stated: about $134 a month
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Kelly C. built a half-decent CRM in about the time it took to research and price CRMs
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…
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Noah Kagan says Claude Max killed $15,788 a year of software, Carta and Zapier included
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…
Saving, as stated: $15,788 a year of software replaced by $2,400 a year of Claude
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Pawan cancelled $1,700/month construction software after bots rebuilt it on QuickBooks
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…
Saving, as stated: $20K a year
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Gabe from Kodus built their own CRM with AI and is now debugging it instead of the product
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,…
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Moss cancelled a $25k PMS, an $8k CRM, Canva, Zapier and Make — then built replacements
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.…
Saving, as stated: $50k+ a year
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Jorge Mena stopped paying $99 a year for a workout app and built Fitbite, just for himself
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…
Saving, as stated: $99 a year
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Fafa dumped Voluum for a vibe-coded tracker and is saving a few hundred dollars a month
Another ad tracker bites the dust. Fafa was renting Voluum, vibe-coded a replacement in a few hours, and now keeps a few hundred dollars a month plus sole custody of the data.…
Saving, as stated: a few hundred dollars a month
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Federico Donatone replaced Wispr Flow, Superhuman, Notion, Granola and Calendly with Claude-built apps
A five-app wipe in one wave. Federico Donatone, CEO of GrowthCab, says Claude has been replacing apps they used to pay 20K$/year for, and making them better and tailored to their vision…
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0xDesigner's impatient, non-technical dad replaced QuickBooks with Codex, but great apps still have fans
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…
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Ado no longer thinks everyone will build their own Figma: short-lived, purpose-built software is likelier
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…
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Riley Brown says vibe coders maintaining their own apps isn't silly, it's already better than most SaaS
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…
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Tired of paying for RubyMine, Sachin built Garnet, a free open-source Ruby & Rails IDE
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…
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Paying Willow $15 a month for dictation, Hunter Bohm built a free, open-source Mac replacement
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…
Saving, as stated: $15 a month
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JW vibe-coded a personal trading terminal and said bye to TradingView
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…
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Samuel Rondot pushes back on 'SaaS is dead': people can cook, and restaurants still exist
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…
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Cory Zue cancels a $600/year SaaS subscription for an Opus-coded in-house alternative
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…
Saving, as stated: $600/year
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Riley Hennigh's client edits a coded site with Claude instead of staying on Webflow or Framer
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…
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Ryan Duncan vibe-coded a Zoom webinars replacement and pushed $24k in sales in a week
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…
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Dan Vega on the Beehiiv debate: you only use a slice of the tools you pay for
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…
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Deniz Sancar's update: 14 SaaS subscriptions replaced, about £4,200 a year saved
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…
Saving, as stated: about £4,200 a year
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Nico Jeannen: software is the one thing getting cheaper, so people vibe code their own
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…
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Lucas Duval built and open-sourced his own email open tracking
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…
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Louie Mota built his own client CRM, and one bug taught him the most
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…
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Open-Genjutsu: a free, open-source answer to $150-a-month video cloning apps
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…
Saving, as stated: $150/month (about $2,000 a year)
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Reilly Chase's two-week SaaS purge: Aircall, Intercom, Front, Shopify and more
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…
Saving, as stated: $125,000 a year so far, by his count
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Dan Limonchik cancels Webflow and rebuilds his portfolio with Claude Code for $0
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…
Saving, as stated: the Webflow plan, rebuilt for $0
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Louis Blythe cancels HubSpot after 10 years and builds a replacement in 2 weeks
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,…
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Ahmad Mas cancels Senja after building testimonials with Claude in 10 minutes
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…