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SaaSpocalypse: We replaced our Asana subscription in a week
Engineer replaced $30k/yr Asana subscription with AI-generated internal tool in 1 week, arguing CRUD SaaS has no future against tech-enabled physical businesses.
- Generative AI enables rapid, low-cost replacement of standard CRUD SaaS products with custom internal tools.
- High subscription costs for generic project management software are unjustified when deep workflow integration is possible via custom builds.
- Pure-play SaaS companies face existential risk from 'tech-enabled' physical businesses building their own efficient software solutions.
Software engineer here for a midsized tech-enabled company. We are not a software company. We just build software to make our physical business work better.
We were paying $30k/year for Asana. We vibe coded it by taking screenshots of Asana screens that we use, telling it to make it work like Asana, then we spent the rest of it integrating it deeply with our internal data and workflows. We did this in 3 days.
We also easily built a server to keep Asana and the new vibe coded app in sync during the transition. We migrated our entire company off Asana in less than a week from building it to cancelling our Asana contract.
We didn't even spend that much effort but it was damn good already. The best part is that it is much more integrated in our workflow now since it shares the same database as our business. For example, We can easily make tickets by assigning it to a real customer while in Asana, we had to manually add/remove customers.
Any SaaS business like Asana has no future. Seriously. I'm not saying all SaaS has no future. But any CRUD SaaS that has a fancy UI like Asana has no future.
Companies that are tech-enabled will see higher growth than pure SaaS companies in my opinion. By that I mean companies that operate in the physical world but use software to make themselves more efficient.
Maintenance also means feature requests, on call monitoring and observability, what happens when it breaks, documentation and Claude skills, ownership lines.
Your team didn’t have to mentally think about it, now it does. I can tell you’re pretty junior based on how you think.
How often does Asana change? It's been the same product since its inception.
Just a ticket tracking system with a fancy UI. Nothing more.
I'm a tech lead with 20 years of software dev experience.
It doesn’t need to change until it does and then you need to spend time figuring out how it should change and why.
but now your team owns a ticketing system.
Yep. The cost to own one is just decreased enough such that it made sense for us to build it ourselves.
This isn't 2010. This is 2026.
Sounds like you worked on some trivial scale, what exactly did Asana charge you $30k for? The only weird thing about your post seems to be how expensive they are
That's what jira enterprise would charge for 400 users...
Unless your company is also at around 400 users scale?
Lol that was sassy as hell for no reason.
“But LLMs also make maintenance a breeze” - sure, until it fucks up and deletes the database. Then you need to look under the hood to figure out what happened and then you cry because it is a fucking mess under there and then you say, “ huh, perhaps we fucked up by thinking we could do this better, but hey at least we “saved money” for a year”.
I call bullshit on the infrastructure cost
Wow you saved 30k a year? Truly the beginning of a new era.
Of course you won't hear that. If the product breaks, which it will, curious who will assume responsibility.
Building a clone is not hard. Even before the era of vibe coding, Asana was a common student project in coding bootcamps. We’re talking about new devs with no work experience.
The trick is not building something that works but keeping that regularly maintained, updated, improved. It’s a major opportunity cost for an already scarce and expensive group of employees.
Also what happens when OP leaves the company? Is the documentation or institutional knowledge there to keep running it smoothly?
A lot of companies think they can eliminate the middle man but what happens is that they become the middle man and realize they’re not too good at it.
I’m a 15 yoe tech lead at faang and has been at faang for my entire career. You don’t seem to understand the true consequences of what you’re doing and the fact that you can’t self reflect or take feedback is a serious sign of your lack of tech lead skills.
I brought up multiple gaps and you’ve failed to address them instead just pointing fingers and saying people don’t understand.
You really do not need a full time person to maintain it. We did something similar and it just works wonderfully. Companies like Asana are in deep trouble. This does not apply to all SW though some has moat like CRM,TOST, TWLO.
In fact most tools like you described will be better for your business than Asana cause you can custom tailor any feature to your business.
Finally someone who gets it.
It's not just that Asana cost us $30k for a CRUD app, it's also that it didn't work well because it was missing all sorts of internal data. By building our own custom version, we can actually make it work well for our business.