Why I Stopped Paying for Most SaaS (And Built My Own in Hours)

I have a custom app that plans my workouts based on my family calendar, my work schedule, and my energy patterns.

I didn't buy it. I didn't hire a developer. I built it myself, in an afternoon, with AI. And I'm not a developer.

This isn't a flex. It's a preview of what's about to happen to the entire software industry.

The Three-Part Anatomy of Every SaaS

Satya Nadella broke it down simply: every software-as-a-service product has two components. A database (where your stuff lives) and business logic (how decisions get made about your stuff).

But there's a third piece he didn't mention: expertise.

Think about Spotify. The database holds every song, your playlists, your listening history. The business logic routes you through the app, checks if you've paid, decides whether to serve you ads. But the expertise is what makes your Discover Weekly actually good. It's the accumulated knowledge of what makes a great recommendation engine, baked into the system by people who spent years figuring it out.

That expertise layer has always been the moat. You could technically host your own task database. You could even write some logic to display it. But replicating the expertise that makes Asana or Monday.com actually useful? That required hiring specialists, running QA, managing deployments. It was expensive enough to make the subscription feel like a bargain.

Was.

The Cost of Labor Is Approaching Zero

Here's what changed: AI is collapsing the cost of implementing expertise into logic.

The database? You can self-host that. Always could, for most business applications. Your tasks, your inventory, your customer records: that's just data.

The operational logic? AI writes that now. Not perfectly, but well enough. And it's getting better every month.

The expertise? This is where it gets interesting.

If you have an expert on your team, whether that's someone who deeply understands task management, or accounting, or marketing, their knowledge can now be extracted and operationalized. Record a conversation with them. Transcribe it. Feed it to AI. Watch it become working software.

If you don't have that expert? AI can fill that gap too. Not with the same depth as a 20-year veteran, but with enough competence to build something that actually works for your specific context.

Why Context Beats Features

Here's what SaaS companies don't want you to realize: their product is designed for everyone. Yours can be designed for you.

That generic project management tool has 400 features because it has to serve 400 different types of companies. You might use 12 of them. You're paying for the other 388.

A homegrown solution built with AI doesn't have that problem. It starts with your constraints. Your workflows. Your weird edge cases that no product manager at a SaaS company has ever considered.

I built a child development tracking app for my son. It knows our pediatrician's benchmarks. It accounts for our schedule. It tells me what to focus on next week, not what some generic milestone chart says all children should be doing at month 14.

No SaaS product could do that. Not because the technology is hard, but because the market isn't big enough for "parents who want AI-personalized developmental tracking for their specific child."

The market is now one person. And that changes everything.

The Exception That Proves the Rule

I still pay for Slack.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's strategy.

Some products earn their subscription. Slack gives us audit compliance, automation hooks, enterprise-grade reliability. Things that would take significant effort to replicate and aren't core to what we do. The calculation is simple: building our own internal messaging platform would distract from building our actual product.

But here's the key: I know exactly why I'm paying for Slack. I've thought through what we'd need to build ourselves, what that would cost in time and focus, and concluded the subscription is worth it.

Most companies haven't done that math. They pay for inventory tracking because "that's what you do." They subscribe to sales management tools because someone said they should. They've never asked: what would it actually take to build something that fits us better?

The answer used to be "too much." That's no longer true.

The New Leverage

There's a negotiation advantage here that most people miss.

When you've built your own version of something, even a rough one, you understand what features actually matter to you. You walk into a vendor conversation knowing that Feature A is essential and Feature B is noise.

That's leverage.

"We need audit logging and SSO. We don't need your analytics dashboard or your mobile app. Can we get a different price?"

You can't ask that question if you don't know what you actually need. And you can't know what you actually need until you've tried building it yourself.

The Personal SaaS Revolution

This extends beyond business.

I mentioned my workout app. It's not just tracking; it's planning. It knows when I have early meetings. It knows when my wife needs me to handle morning childcare. It adjusts my training load based on what my actual life looks like, not what some fitness influencer's life looks like.

This is the future: personal software that fits like a tailored suit instead of off-the-rack compromises.

Want a mobile app? Build one. Prefer a desktop dashboard? Make that instead. The limiting factor is no longer technical skill or development budget. It's imagination.

What would you build if building were free?

That question used to be hypothetical. It's becoming practical.

The Real Shift

The end of SaaS isn't really about software. It's about the inversion of how we think about solutions.

The old model: find a product that's close enough to what you need, then adapt your workflows to fit it.

The new model: understand what you actually need, then build something that fits exactly.

The gap between those two approaches used to be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of development time. AI is closing that gap to hours and almost nothing.

Some SaaS companies will survive this. The ones providing genuine infrastructure, licensed content, or capabilities that are genuinely hard to replicate. But the ones selling commodity workflows wrapped in nice interfaces?

Their moat just evaporated.