One Builder Replaced $25K/Month of SaaS With Vibe-Coded Tools

Indie developer levelsio says he's replaced around $25,000 a month in SaaS subscriptions across his sites with tools he built himself, several with AI assistance. The largest single claimed saving, about $10,000 a month, comes from replacing human moderators with his own moderation system built on xAI's models; customer support automation is the next largest at a claimed $5,000 a month.

The rest of the list is smaller, more technical swaps: a weather API replaced with Norway's public meteorology data, Google's Vision API for flagging explicit images replaced with the open-source NudeNET library, and his own scraper, the one he describes building with Playwright, standing in for Scrapingbee and SerpAPI. He says he considers this close to his practical limit, since the remaining paid services, domain registration, email delivery, cloud storage, and server hosting, would require taking on infrastructure work like running his own mail server or GPU hardware, which he says he doesn't want to do. All figures are his own self-reported estimates, not independently audited.

“I replaced all these SaaS with my own vibe coded now, so about $25,000/mo savings:”

“I think I have reached my final limit of replacing my SaaS services as I have these left, but that'd mean becoming an ICANN registrar (I don't want 😁), managing my own email (I don't want), managing my own hard drives at home in a storage (I don't want) and managing my own servers at home too (I don't want) and running my own GPU rig at home (I don't want):”