SaaS is Dead. Long Live SaaS.
How I replaced six SaaS subscriptions with custom AI-built software over a single weekend — and why the application-layer SaaS model is dying.
Last month I was paying for Squarespace, Mailchimp, Calendly, Stripe Billing, Google Analytics, and a handful of other platforms just to run my small coaching business.
Six SaaS subscriptions. Six logins. Six dashboards that each showed me a slice of my business but never the whole picture. Six platforms where I was the one bending my workflow to fit their templates.
Over a single weekend, I replaced all of them.
Not with another SaaS platform. Not with a no-code tool. With AI-built, custom software that does exactly what my business needs — nothing more, nothing less.
One Dashboard to Rule Them All
My admin dashboard now shows me everything in one place: which athletes need attention, revenue across every channel (Stripe, PayPal, coaching invoices), email engagement trends, and training activity from connected Strava accounts. It knows what a coaching business actually cares about because it was built for one.
No more logging into Mailchimp to check open rates, then switching to Stripe to see revenue, then opening a spreadsheet to reconcile PayPal invoices. One system. My system.
What Changed
The cost of custom software just went to zero
What used to require a dev team and six figures now takes a weekend and a conversation with an AI coding agent. I'm a technical founder, but the complexity ceiling keeps dropping. We're approaching the point where the limiting factor isn't engineering skill — it's clarity of thought about what your business actually needs.
Generic tools optimize for the average user. Custom tools optimize for you.
Mailchimp doesn't know that my coaching business has two coaches with different revenue shares, or that my athletes connect via Strava, or that a "lead" for me is someone who filled out a coaching intake form — not someone who downloaded a whitepaper. My system does, because I told it.
The integration tax is real and nobody talks about it
Every SaaS platform you add creates a data silo. Connecting them (Zapier, Make, custom webhooks) is its own part-time job. When your software is one system, the data is already connected. Customer signs up → gets email welcome sequence → coach sees their training data → invoice auto-generates. No glue code. No middleware. No "syncing."
What's Not Dying
I'm not saying SaaS is literally dead. Stripe still processes my payments. Supabase still hosts my database. Vercel still deploys my site. The infrastructure layer is more valuable than ever.
What's dying is the application layer SaaS — the Mailchimps, the Squarespaces, the platforms that give you 80% of what you need and charge you monthly for the privilege of working around the other 20%.
The Era of Personalized Software
We're entering the era of personalized software. Where every business can have tools built exactly for how they operate. Where the question isn't "which SaaS should I use?" but "what does my business actually need?"
The answer to that question used to cost $200K and six months. Now it costs a weekend.