The urge to build everything
“Why should I pay you? I can build it myself.”That’s what teams said.
vostride TeamAI (SI) has accelerated software development. A small team can now ship as fast as a large enterprise. Everyone wants to cut SaaS costs and build it all themselves, from CRMs to payment gateways.
We call it “The urge to build EVERYTHING.”
Reverse Engineer Anything (REA) lets agents inspect apps, compiled binaries, and SaaS interfaces, then recreate their features. Every other x-fluencer seems to have a new clone to show off.
Take ArtCraft. Its team is building a whole family of creative apps in Rust: PhotoCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, and more.
Let’s see how you could save $100K a year at your company.
$reverse-engineer-anything Recreate Salesforce for our team, with contacts, deal pipelines, dashboards, and CSV imports.
SaaS-pocalypse
SaaS-pocalypse is the fear that AI will kill SaaS subscriptions because teams can build the software themselves.
People paying hundreds of thousands a year to Salesforce claimed to build a replacement in a week or two.
Are they using it? Hard to tell. They definitely used it to record a demo for X ;)
Salesforce
NYSE: CRM$252.05
+$1.89 (+0.76%) over the year
Now you own it
Sales needs new permissions. An import duplicates a thousand contacts. An integration breaks. Meanwhile, your internal Notion clone can’t find half the documents.
AI can help fix it. Someone on your team still has to notice the problem, explain it, and check the fix.
That person already has a job. How much of it are they giving up to keep your internal tools running?
So SaaS is safe?
No. Some will die. Some will get spoon-bent.
But we’d still pay for software that saves our team work. Building a CRM is fun until you’re the person everyone calls when it breaks.
And SaaS is still growing. Stripe reported over 180% more new platform businesses than a year earlier, measured over three months. These are businesses with real customers, not just demos.
Build your own when it makes sense. A subscription that gives your team time back can still be a good deal.
We hear this from customers
At vostride, we’re building agent-qa, an open-source AI QA engineer. Many teams we speak to have already built their own testing tools.
They keep running into the same problems: upkeep, expensive runs, falling behind newer agents, and tests that stop working.
They’re happy when agent-qa works out of the box. QA is what we spend our time on, so they can get back to their product.
Pick your battles
Build what matters to your business. Before replacing another subscription, ask who will look after it a year from now, and what they’ll have to stop doing.