Build vs buy, honestly
Cancel & Rebuild
You don't cancel the SaaS. You become it. Every other build vs buy tool flatters the “I could rebuild this in a weekend with AI” itch with an upfront cost. This one turns your build, your upkeep, and the real chance you'll abandon it into a single monthly figure, then stamps it next to the vendor's actual bill. Drag the sliders and watch which invoice you'd rather receive.
Keep paying
Stand downPayable to: the vendor
Payable to: yourself
You'd be writing yourself a bigger invoice to become the worst supported vendor you've ever had. The subscription is the fee for never thinking about it. Stop feeling guilty.
The one number you already know. This is the bill you're tempted to cancel.
Your real billable or salary rate, not zero. Free time isn't free, and this is the input people lowball to talk themselves into it.
Enter the shipped number rather than the demo. The AI gets you to a demo in about 20% of the work, and the last fifth of the features eats the other 80%.
Patches, breakages, the Sunday night 500, and doing by hand the features your version won't have. The cost naive calculators ignore entirely.
Honest 2 year net
−AUD$1,880
Where the pitch actually lands once upkeep is counted. Over 2 years, rebuilding leaves you this far down.
What the pitch skipped
AUD$2,200
The rebuild pitch had you saving AUD$320. The upkeep and abandonment it never counted add up to AUD$2,200, so that saving slides AUD$2,200 down to the honest net. The big number here is that slide, the cost the pitch never put on the page.
Unpaid on-call
12 hrs/yr
Roughly the time you'd spend as the on-call engineer for your own tool. The vendor does that bit for you.
This is a money model only. It ignores the legitimate reasons to build that have nothing to do with money, like owning your data, no lock-in, learning, and an exact fit. The security maths also flips hard the moment another human touches it (roughly 45% of AI generated code fails basic security tests, fine for a tool only you use, a dealbreaker with real users). Build tokens run about AUD$45 to AUD$230 all up and hosting is usually AUD$0 on a free tier, both rounding error next to your time, which is why neither sits in the headline number above.
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