SaaS obituaries, page 3
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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Done paying for Notion and Obsidian, they built and open-sourced a notes app
Kuro Shiro didn't want to pay for Notion and Obsidian anymore, so they built their own note app and open-sourced it. The self-roast is the best part: their other products still have…
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Newsletter operators are fed up with Beehiiv's price hikes, says Travis Biziorek
Travis Biziorek is in groups with lots of newsletter operators, and he says many are fed up with Beehiiv and its price hikes. They're switching providers, building their own, or jumping to…
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Eric Rea's company replaced Jira, Salesloft, Gainsight and more with its own tools
Eric Rea says that in the past year his company replaced more than 10 software tools it used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on, including Jira, Salesloft, Sigma, Gainsight and…
Saving, as stated: tools they used to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on
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DBOS moves its entire website off Webflow with Claude Code
Qian Li always found Webflow hard to navigate, a choice made three years ago. So the team had Claude Code migrate the entire DBOS site from Webflow to React. The agent worked…
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Kwebbelkop: stop paying monthly for software you can vibe-code in an afternoon
Kwebbelkop has a blunt message: stop paying monthly for software you can vibe-code in an afternoon. He names the targets himself, Notion, Monday, HubSpot and your Squarespace site, and tells people to…
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Gregor Zunic builds his personal software straight on top of Claude Code
Gregor Zunic has been building loads of personal software with a minimal setup: no agent framework, just Claude Code on a dev machine, which vibe-codes whatever helpers and UI it needs. For…
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He cancelled Filmora to build, and open-source, his own video editor
Serhii Ovsiienko cancelled his Wondershare Filmora subscription. His plan: build his own video editor with AI, tailored exactly to his needs, and open-source it. He points out that a $20-a-month Claude subscription…
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Kyle Walker built his own AI agent setup, and doubts most people will
Kyle Walker didn't want to lock himself into another AI subscription, so he built his own agent setup in a day: OpenClaw agents on the VPS he already uses, talking to him…
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Claude has replaced Lovable, Figma, Gamma, Veed, Cursor and (almost) Notion for him
Kais lists the maker tools Claude has recently replaced for him at blockitAI, and it reads like a kill feed: Lovable, Figma, Gamma, Veed, Cursor, and increasingly Notion, which he never imagined…
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Aidan Shaw built his own contract generator, finance dashboard and AI visibility tracker
Aidan Shaw says he more or less stopped paying for a bunch of SaaS this year. With Claude Code he built his own contract generator, his own finance dashboard and his own…
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A side-gig DJ dumps a $400-a-year CRM for a self-built one
Paul DJs on the side, enough to need a CRM, and was paying more than $400 a year for one, with a price hike every renewal. So he built his own. It's…
Saving, as stated: $400+/year
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Jon Yongfook's 2026 indie hacker playbook: build the 83% cheaper competitor
Jon Yongfook summed up the 2026 indie hacker playbook in four steps: complain on X that an entrenched SaaS product is too expensive, collect the likes, call it validation, then build a…
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Atta quits SaaS to build pay-once Mac apps
Atta's answer to the SaaS apocalypse is to leave the battlefield entirely. He says SaaS is dead and he's building Mac apps now: no servers, no monthly churn, no fighting 50 clones,…
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He didn't want to pay for Screen Studio, so Codex built a clone in two hours
Vybhav Ramachandran didn't feel like paying for Screen Studio, so he asked OpenAI's Codex to build him a clone. It took two hours, and he says it's 'so good'. Next on his…
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He skipped Adobe and DaVinci, and Claude built his editing tool in 11 minutes
Dan Greenheck hates editing his course videos, with up to five or six retakes per clip. Automating it meant paying Adobe $23 a month or $300 for DaVinci Resolve Studio. Instead, Claude…
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Four years in, he cancels Fusion 360 and dictates CAD to his agent
Ryan Vogel used Fusion 360 for four years and just cancelled the subscription. His replacement isn't another CAD package: he dictates what he wants to his AI agent, which then renders an…
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Noah Kagan cancels Zapier after 10 years: $4,788 a year to $0
Another one bites the dust in Noah Kagan's War on Expensive Software, and this time it's Zapier, a tool his team used for 10 years. The audit was brutal: they paid for…
Saving, as stated: $4,788 a year
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A franchise vibe-coded its own support platform for under $30 a month
Steven Shortino's franchise set out to build a ticketing platform and accidentally consolidated all of its platforms into one, for under $30 a month. It now has an AI assistant with an…
Saving, as stated: five figures in SaaS subscriptions; runs for under $30/month
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Paying $200 a month for Claude to avoid $20 a month for Spotify
djcows has done the maths, and the maths is hilarious: instead of paying $20 a month for Spotify, it's $200 a month for Claude to make his own Spotify for free. Then,…
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Tony Dinh replaces his i18n translation SaaS and saves $124 a month
Tony Dinh dropped the SaaS he used for i18n translations, cutting $124 a month. His app now has a built-in translation harness that he says produces more accurate, in-context translations. The numbers…
Saving, as stated: $124/month
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After 30 years of paying Adobe, he uninstalled every Adobe app
Dux Maverick has bought Adobe licenses since the 1990s and kept paying when they switched to subscriptions. He tried Affinity and GIMP and bounced off, because his muscle memory was all Adobe.…
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A designer of 25 years cancels his personal Figma subscription
Frederik has been a designer for more than 25 years, through Fireworks, Sketch, InVision and Figma, and he just cancelled his personal Figma subscription. His side-project stack is now ChatGPT Images for…
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Tony Dinh joins the dark side and replaces a $600-a-month newsletter tool
'Joining the dark side,' says Tony Dinh, with the energy of someone picking up a shotgun. He's replacing a SaaS he pays more than $600 a month for, and all he uses…
Saving, as stated: $600+/month
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Every subscription app is one price hike away from a free clone
Vincent Eliezer reacts to someone vibe-coding the entire Adobe creative suite and releasing it for free. His punchline is the real headline: every subscription app right now is one price hike away…
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Sam Vale: if software can be cloned in a weekend, what's left?
Not every post in the obituary column is a victory lap. Sam Vale says he has spent months building everything he always wanted with AI, from apps and micro-SaaS products to platforms,…
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Latent Space ran a hackathon to clone a $43,000-a-year SaaS in a weekend
Most 'SaaS is dead' talk stays theoretical. swyx and the Latent Space podcast tested it: they took a real $43,000-a-year SaaS they use and ran a global hackathon to clone it in…
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Marc Lou sends his first newsletter from his vibe-coded Beehiiv alternative
Day one after the breakup, and the replacement is already shipping mail. Marc Lou sent the first issue of his newsletter from the Beehiiv alternative he vibe-coded himself, and he puts the…
Saving, as stated: 10% of the cost
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Tired of bloated gym apps, murion built a workout tracker in one morning
murion was tired of gym apps stuffed with features that never get used, so he spent one morning with Claude building Ingot, a workout tracker shaped around how murion actually trains. The…
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He built his own Superhuman in a few days and dropped the $40 subscription
Anthony Kroeger spent a few days with Opus 5.5 building his own version of Superhuman, and he now uses it daily. Goodbye $40-a-month subscription, salute emoji included. His favourite part is that…
Saving, as stated: $40/month
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One weekend, ten SaaS subscriptions cancelled, about £3,600 a year saved
Deniz Sancar went on a weekend rampage. GoHighLevel, Kit, Zoom, Loom, Calendly, Repurpose.io, Hyros, Lickd, ElevenLabs and iclosed were all cancelled and replaced with internal custom tools. The survivors: Claude Code, Virlo,…
Saving, as stated: about £3,600 a year