The Era of SaaS Is Ending — We're Building Our Own Tools Now

I spend over $10k a month on SaaS tools to run my business. Harvest for time tracking, Jira for project management, various ERPs, analytics dashboards — the list goes on. Every month, thousands of dollars flow out to third-party platforms for tools that, frankly, do about 60% of what we actually need.

Then something interesting happened.

That got me thinking. So I announced to my whole team: if you vibecode something that can replace one of our current tools, we will start paying you for it instead of paying the third-party vendor. This lets them build a real tool with a real use case while allowing us to save money and own our infrastructure.

The response was immediate. One of my PMs is building a replacement for Jira right now. My co-founder vibecoded an entire ERP for us. Our tech lead is building an AI engineer agent. And I am building a vibecoding tool called Bolder AI.

Think about what is happening here. The cost of building custom software has dropped so dramatically that it is now cheaper to build than to license. A single person with an AI coding assistant can build in a weekend what used to take a team of engineers months to develop.

The era of SaaS is coming to an end. Soon every company will own their own software. Building is becoming cheaper than licensing. The companies that figure this out first will have a massive competitive advantage — lower costs, tools perfectly tailored to their workflows, and zero vendor lock-in.

If you are still paying thousands per month for off-the-shelf tools that do not quite fit your needs, it is time to rethink your approach. The tools to build your own are already here.