Why pay for software when you can build your own in an evening
I'm cancelling subscriptions one by one. Not because I'm cheap. Because building it myself is often simpler, faster and more comfortable.
It used to be a clear choice. You needed a tool for your team — you either paid a service thirty to fifty dollars per seat per month, or assigned a developer to it for a couple of months. Almost everyone picked the first option.
Now it's different. With Claude or Cursor I can put together a simple Kanban for my team in one evening. A small CRM in two evenings. A proper task tracker with Telegram notifications in a week.
And then comes the question. Why am I paying four hundred dollars a month for ClickUp for ten people? What am I doing in there that I couldn't just write myself?
Usually — nothing.
This story is already mainstream. Klarna ditched Salesforce and Workday, replaced everything with their own AI stack, saved four million dollars a year. A marketing agency on Twitter said it cut eighty percent of its subscriptions and built replacements in two weeks. In January, software companies lost three hundred billion in market cap in a single trading day — the market is starting to get it.
What you can safely cancel right now: simple task trackers, CRMs with one funnel, form builders, time trackers, dashboards from your database, internal wikis. All of it can be built in a couple of evenings and will solve your actual problem, not the problem of developers in San Francisco.
Not everything, of course. You can't replace Stripe — licences. You can't replace Slack because your customers are in there. You can't replace Figma because your designers won't go anywhere else. Corporate Salesforce with its security audits is also staying put, but that's not about small business.
If you're using 5–10% of the features — build your own.
If you're using the service as an ecosystem with integrations and a community — leave it for now. It's not about money, it's about where the value lives.
And one honest note. Last week a Claude agent at some startup wiped a production database in nine seconds, backups and all. It's part of the package. If you're not ready to be your own admin, devops and support — maybe thirty dollars a month isn't such a bad investment.
But if you are — there are ten times more opportunities now than a year ago. I wouldn't miss out.