Replace paid SaaS tools with your own vibe coded services

An indie founder replaced more than a dozen paid services across his sites with self-built tools and says it saves about $25,000 a month.

By Pieter Levels on X · Posted Sep 9, 2026 · Added Oct 15, 2026

Difficulty: IntermediateOur rating
Time to build: Not reportedOur estimate
Monthly cost: Sourced: several replacements run at $0-$5/mo on existing serversFrom the source
Revenue: Not reportedWe only show revenue the source states
Result: Sourced: about $25,000/mo in savings (self-reported)

What they did

Pieter Levels (@levelsio) listed his replacements: his own weather service, an image-resizing API, NSFW detection, video streaming on a VPS, screenshots, error monitoring, maps, uptime checks, a blog, a scraper, and AI moderation and support bots replacing human moderators and support.

How it went

He puts total savings at about $25,000/mo, with the biggest items being moderation (~$10,000/mo) and customer support (~$5,000/mo). He keeps domains, email sending, storage, backups, servers and LLMs on vendors.

Worth knowing

You take on maintenance and uptime for everything you replace. He draws the line at running registrars, email, storage hardware or GPUs himself.

Builder recipe

Our own starting point, written from the source. Adapt it to your setup.

Stack

Your AI coding agent
A cheap VPS
Open-source libraries for each job

Steps

List every SaaS bill and sort by monthly cost.
For each, check if an open-source library covers 90% of what you use.
Have your agent build a thin service around it with tests and monitoring.
Run both in parallel for a week before canceling the vendor.

Starter prompt

I pay $[X]/mo for [service] and only use [features]. Build a minimal self-hosted replacement using [open-source lib], with the same API shape so I can swap it in, plus a health check and error alerts to Telegram.