The news: Some small businesses and startups are ditching software-as-a-service (SaaS) giants Salesforce and HubSpot and building custom apps with Anthropic’s Claude Code, Replit, and Lovable instead, per The Information. 

• Greenleaf Management, which has 55 employees, saved about $100,000 per year by swapping out Salesforce with an AI app that costs around $3,600 per year. “Salesforce is super complex,” Greenleaf’s Dave Codrea told The Information, “They provide a lot of value, but … [we were] only using a little piece of it.”
• The Seattle Seawolves rugby team, with 70 employees, replaced Salesforce and AXS ticketing with bespoke vibe-coded solutions, saving $100,000 annually in software spending and lifting revenues 25% since March. Its Anthropic costs rose, but “the cost benefit is still much better,” team owner Adrian Balfour said.
• Startup Atonom slashed SaaS costs from $40,000 to $1,200 annually after realizing it was paying for enterprise plans meant for much larger teams, per TechGig.

Although just a small portion of SaaS providers’ client load, some of these switchers are saving significant costs while keeping core business functions intact. However, those upfront gains may fade if internal teams struggle to maintain custom code or miss future platform updates.

Zooming in: For AI coding companies like Anthropic, vibe-coding replacements for SaaS providers means a bump in token or usage earnings.  For SaaS companies, this might present a minor threat given providers like ServiceNow’s 97% renewal rate, suggesting the core business remains intact.

The shift for small businesses marks a potential fork in the road for enterprise software buyers. One path leads toward deeper SaaS dependency, accepting premium pricing for reliability, security, and continuous AI innovation, while the other points to AI-built custom solutions that trade subscription fees for AI development overhead and vendor risk.

Implications for brands: For most large enterprises, the complexity of custom workflows, costs of data migration, and distraction of building proprietary software makes full replacement impractical.

For small companies and those with engineering capacity, AI coding tools lower the barrier to building bespoke solutions, eliminating both subscription fees and the specialist headcount necessary to operate large SaaS suites.

Brands should test custom-built agents to automate specific workflows, then negotiate new terms from SaaS vendors as usage decreases. Run workflows in parallel to expose gaps while refining custom solutions for scale and complexity.

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