r/stocks
SaaSpocalypse: We replaced our Asana subscription in a week
Engineer replaced $30k/yr Asana with custom AI-built app in 1 week, arguing generic CRUD SaaS is obsolete due to AI coding efficiency.
- Generative AI significantly lowers the barrier to building custom internal tools, reducing reliance on expensive off-the-shelf SaaS.
- Generic CRUD SaaS products face existential risk as companies can now build better-integrated, tailored solutions at a fraction of the cost.
- High subscription costs and poor integration capabilities make established SaaS vendors vulnerable to rapid displacement by in-house AI development.
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 weren't happy with the price and that it doesn't integrate well with our internal systems. 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 the time integrating it deeply with our internal data and workflows. We did this in 3 days with 1 developer (me).
I also easily built a server to keep Asana and the new vibe coded app in sync during the transition. I 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. Internal users are saying it's working much better than Asana since it's tailored to our business and workflows.
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.
Didnt you post this the other day?
yep sure did
Yup. I saw it too. He's spamming. Probably trying to fuel fud for his puts.
Keep reposting your shit lmao
Cool story bro.
Cool story bro.
Wonder what the purpose is of repeatedly posting this in a finance sub. It’s not that whatever short position OP has will be influenced by his posting no matter the traction it receives
I am a tad-bit skeptical. SaaS is more than just CRUD.
What about managing infrastructure, software updates, maintenance, data redundancy, IAM etc?
"The best part is that it is much more integrated in our workflow now since it shares the same database as our business." So you vibe coded an app that is directly connected to your production database, with limited testing?
This just sounds like red flags everywhere.
Interesting, I work at an marketing agency and now recently am experimenting with building some internal tools, so far looking very promising, just wondering what your biggest challenges where and how you look at the maintaining part of it?
As in, if there are problems or new features/intergrations needed, who will be responsible able down the line? You?
Any tips in managing this inhouse?
What's your use case / what existing SaaS tool are you trying to replace?
Internal tools can range from a simple python script to a full-blown application.
For the social reporting side, we were using alot
Of thirdparty reporting tools that use API pulls from set social media platforms. These were very expensive and very limited. Now I am building a dashboard where a social media manager, could drop an CVS export from lets say Meta. And creat an whole dashboard with calculations and graphs of our posted content per platform/client. It even has an Claude Haiku model running in the background that could generate a first draft of an anlysis for set Social media manager. This job took at least 1,5 days before, now 30 minutes.
For the ball park tool we currently use Google sheets. Which is fine, but after building a tool for 2 days you could already see the many many upsides of this.
This sounds like a web-scraping automation + dashboarding / analytics project. Great for internal automation.
If i were you i would design something like this:
\[Webscraping layer\] (Platform agnostic, returns a standardized .csv) --> \[data processing layer\] (Parse, filter, clean, process .csv; keep only what you want) --> \[Dashboard + Analytics Layer\] (Build custom dashboard charts + LLM analysis of scraped content).
For dashboards just go with the standard powerbi / Grafana / google sheets / excel / quicksight. I wouldn't spend too much time custom building a dashboarding tool. For your LLM analysis if you really want to keep your cost low without a quality hit, try using Deepseek API.
Note: For a large enterprise there might be penalties / legal repercussions if you scrape on your own without using official APIs, please check with legal. I THINK as long as your volume isnt ridiculously high, you can most likely get away with a custom scraper / paid scraping service.
Did you use Claude?
I mean, for reference 30k/year is 1/4-1/6 (or even less in many cases) of the all in salary of an engineer in the US. I’m extremely skeptical of this story overall, but as a working software dev myself I can promise you that the ongoing maintenance for a system like this is going to take more than 1/4 of an engineers time.
I do think asana is the weakest of the productivity software companies, but I hold long positions in Monday and Atlassian because they seem to still be turning in solid results despite fears of saaspocolypse.
Agreed