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Would you vibe-code your own tools to avoid paying subscriptions?

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A platform ( canivibecodeit) recently went viral on X for showing which paid tools you could realistically rebuild yourself.

Design tools, ChatGPT, or Claude are obviously hard to replace. But invoice tools, forms, simple CMSs, or dictation apps seem much more realistic.

The question is whether the build time and maintenance are worth saving $9–19 per month.

Which tools would you actually build instead of paying for them?

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If it's core to my business, I'll build it. If just supporting infrastructure like email, analytics, core to my business, I'll build it. or payments, I'd rather use a proven service.

 Agree with you, Gordon! Have you already built something rather than paying for a tool?

I don't think it's really about saving $9-19/month. It's more about investing some time upfront to build a tool that's perfectly integrated into your own workflow and can be reused whenever you need it.

I really like this fundamental approach: spend time once to create a convenient toolset, then work faster, avoid recurring costs, and have something that fits your process better than a generic off-the-shelf solution.

 I agree to an extent, Adana! But if you tried to do this for all 50 tools you use, it would make no sense. The time investment would be enormous.

For one or two very specific tools that are central to your workflow, absolutely. But rebuilding your entire software stack just to avoid subscriptions would probably cost far more in time than the subscriptions themselves.

Which tools would you personally rebuild instead of continuing to pay for them?

 Not all of the stack, of course =)

For example, we built an agentic CMS that handles a big part of our workflow. It analyzes competitors, automatically publishes blog content to custom domains, generates and maintains live documentation directly from developers' prompts, and helps us create complete web pages and subpages.

Those are the kinds of highly specialized workflows that are worth building in-house because they give us exactly what we need.

 This is really useful! Do you plan to stay inhouse or planning to share with others as well?

 We're planning to launch it on PH.

The interesting part is that while building , we ended up building this CMS along the way, and realized we'd accidentally created a second product ))

Now we're polishing it up, because we think it has value well beyond our own internal use.

It feels like choosing between renting versus owning an apartment. In a rented one you cannot change much, but fixing it is not your problem. In your own you get the flexibility and you also get every repair, plus nobody can raise the rent or sell the building out from under you.

We built our own content pipeline instead of paying for a writing tool, mainly because we wanted it to work our way rather than to save the subscription. On the other hand we pay for email delivery, since building that would buy us nothing.

 That’s a great analogy, Anastasiia! I also think it makes sense to build one or two mission-critical tools exactly the way you need them. But not at a scale where maintaining your own software stack becomes the main focus instead of doing the actual work.

What type of content is your writing tool built for? Is it focused on a specific social platform, blog posts, or something else?

And what other tools would you consider building yourselves rather than continuing to pay for subscriptions?

 It's for our blog posts.
I was thinking about vibe-coding a simple CRM, but a spreadsheet is more than enough for now. Salesforce and HubSpot offer free tiers, so money was never the reason. I just don't want the data sitting on someone else's server.

 That makes total sense. Privacy is a much better reason to build your own than saving a few bucks.

100%, I vibe coded my own version of Wispr Flow, it barely costs anything in tokens, works just as well, and I tweaked some little things that annoyed about the UX of the original. Not sure I'd vibe code anything handling financial data, though, like invoicing software

 Cool, Denitsa! Really cool! How much does it cost you per month compared to Wispr Flow? I use some open-source tool for that, although building my own might actually make sense too.

Is there anything else you think you’d vibe-code for yourself?

 about $0.50 per month, I use ElevenLabs for voice-to-text and a Gemini model for cleanup (and "text tightening" if needed). Wispr Flow is $15. Sadly, all the other subscription tools I use would be virtually impossible to vibe code (stuff like Canva and CapCut for example)

 wow, this is worth it! Might be great to vibe code for me. Can you share the exact process to build it?

Yeah, some tools like Canva/Figma/ElevenLabs...not possible

The variable that decides it for me is not the monthly cost, it is whether the tool needs to change as the business changes. A dictation app or a simple form generator does roughly the same job in a year, so building it once is a fair trade of time for money. Anything that has to keep tracking new context, new customers, new edge cases, a CRM, an ops layer, a scheduling brain, ends up needing small fixes that never show up in the initial build estimate. I learned this running a few service businesses on spreadsheets I had built myself years earlier. They were perfect on day one and quietly wrong by month six, since nobody was maintaining the logic while the business kept moving. Worth asking not just what this costs monthly, but who updates it when the business looks different than it does today.

 Absolutely, Stacy! I think maintenance is the hardest part. Building something is relatively easy. But the main question is whether you have the time, motivation, and capacity to keep monitoring and fixing it, instead of focusing on the work that actually matters.

Anything else you plan to vibe code for your workflow?

  The next one on my list is client intake, right now a lead fills a form and I manually check calendar availability, send a confirmation, then update a tracker by hand. Not complex logic, just three steps that depend entirely on me remembering to do all three in order every time. Anything past that, invoicing, payments, anything touching money, I would rather pay for and let someone else carry that liability.

 Have you tried ? I think it's really helpful to your use case.

 Have not tried it, thank you for pointing me there. Form building is not the part that scared me anyway, it was always the calendar check and the tracker update happening reliably after the form, so I will look at whether it connects those three steps or just replaces the first one.