SaaS obituaries, page 2
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.
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Travis Biziorek kills Elementor and PMPro with vibe-coded replacements
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…
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Aaron Edwards skips paying for Asana and vibe-codes an agent-first task tracker
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.…
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Kyle Gawley replaced all his SaaS, then hired a $2k-a-month server guy
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.…
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Oliur's team built its own email platform on Amazon SES, with MCP built in
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…
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Instead of paying for Greptile or CodeRabbit, he built and open-sourced his own AI code review
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…
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Tired of paying huge fees for GEO tracking, Ryan Jones built his own tool
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…
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Beka Makharoblishvili replaces a $100/month Smartlead plan with a cold mailer built in a day
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…
Saving, as stated: $100/month
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Suganthan cancels Photoshop for a free, open-source alternative
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…
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Webflow, Figma and Slack, all cancelled in one week
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…
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Reilly Chase swaps a $39 Shopify plan for a Laravel store built from his iPhone
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…
Saving, as stated: $39/month
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Kyle Gawley launches DataSlop, a parody open-source DataFast alternative
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…
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He avoided a $9-a-month screen recorder by spending about $1,500 in tokens
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…
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Sankalp's Claude-driven video editor replaces his $29 Descript plan
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…
Saving, as stated: $29/month
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From $99 a month to under $1: an open-source Post Bridge alternative
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…
Saving, as stated: $99/month down to under $1/month
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Andrea Bosoni: SaaS prices are finally going down
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…
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After more than 10 years, Eli Finer cancels YNAB for his own budgeting app
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…
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After the Beehiiv drama, aaron cancelled DataFast and vibe-coded a replacement
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…
Saving, as stated: $500-$1,000 a year
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Calendly wouldn't sync two emails for free, so ZazenCodes built a scheduler from a phone
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…
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Dirk Lauf built his own Mac dictation tool: 28,525 words for 6 cents
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…
Saving, as stated: 6 cents for the month
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Arthur built four internal tools he used to pay for, and says distribution is the last moat
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,…
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Why pay $240 a year for a text box with a timer? Hammer built a post scheduler
Hammer was about to pay $20 a month to schedule tweets and balked at $240 a year for 'a text box with a timer'. So Hammer built it, once. Every post is…
Saving, as stated: $240 a year
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Pitched a white-labeled Claude app, NeverSchelling had already built one for about $20 a month
NeverSchelling has been pitched a white-labeled Claude app for the third time in as many months. The reply: sorry, already built this myself months ago, and it processes more than 400 checks…
Saving, as stated: about $20/month in tokens for 400+ checks
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Up at 6am, freakyclown rebuilt a SaaS the company was too small to buy
freakyclown had to be up at 6am anyway, so he vibe-coded a reverse-engineered version of a SaaS product the company was too small to purchase. The MVP ran in under an hour,…
Saving, as stated: upwards of $50,000 a year
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Kyle Gawley's $19 email tool replacement goes slightly wrong
Kyle Gawley cancelled his $19-a-month email tool and vibe-coded his own. It sent 6 billion emails in 20 minutes, and his AWS bill came to $4,489,337. 'I'm saving $19/mo though.' It's a…
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A £1,500-a-year quiz platform renewal, replaced in 20 minutes
Milly Tamati's quiz platform renewal was coming up at £1,500 a year, which raised the question: could they build their own with Claude and Beehiiv's MCP? Twenty minutes later, it was built.…
Saving, as stated: £1,500/year renewal
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All-in on AI, he cancelled several subscriptions this week by building his own apps
bdmusic1978 says they're all-in on AI, and the proof is in the subscription list: just this week, several software subscriptions got cancelled because building better-customised versions of those apps was possible. No…
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Board games, Chrome extensions and a reading companion, each vibe-coded in under 15 minutes
Shraddha says reading about the age of personal software is one thing, and experiencing it first-hand is another. The list of things vibe-coded in under 15 minutes: versions of expensive board games…
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Descript's MCP was rate-limited, so he built his own editor for Claude
Sankalp Sinha was paying Descript $29 a month to edit his reels, but its MCP integration with Claude was rate-limited. So he built his own. Now Claude sees the video, edits it,…
Saving, as stated: $29/month
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He told his CRM vendor no renewal: €17k a year saved
Tino Ferreira just told his company's CRM vendor they won't be renewing. He built his own CRM, AI-native and shaped around exactly what they need, with 'no bullshit extras nobody asked for'.…
Saving, as stated: €17k a year (minimum)
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Marc Lou: software is having its Uber moment
Marc Lou compares this moment to Uber arriving in the taxi business. For years SaaS companies could keep raising prices because building an alternative was too expensive. AI changes that: anyone can…