Things I would have done differently (consulting)

I'm glad to see the first thing you mentioned was the value of purchasing software.

For some reason software developers are particularly averse to paying for software, even when it pays for itself.

My current company spent over $10k + at least a month of developer salary building an OKR app for the company, so probably in total $25k. One look at the SaaS landscape there would have revealed plenty of $5/mo/seat solutions that would take DECADES to break even with the investment we already made. To add insult to injury, the app was vibe-coded and barely works.

In my experience, software that wants to help you is cheap. Software that wants to _trap_ you (Salesforce, Oracle, the Cloud) is expensive, and any software you write yourself falls into the latter category by default (you own it, you maintain it).

I’m a one person team, but I went the other direction and replaced my paid time tracking and invoicing software with something custom. The decider wasn’t the monthly payment. As the author mentions, it was cheap costing me less an one billable hour a month, but 2 things made me angry enough to do it: 1) they were roughly doubling my Stripe fees for the convenience of having them process my transactions and 2) they put an artificial limit on how many clients I could keep active at one time.

I should have tracked how much time I spent; in the new tracker there is a module to track unassigned working time for projects like this ;). I would estimate it took me 20ish hours on the first pass and another 20 spread out over the last 3 months with little fixes and additions. My LLM tooling and approach is better now though so I’d estimate less if I were to do it again.

I would push back on the SaSpocalyse framing as being limited to more expensive per seat software. Last month I was visiting family and I wanted to see how a non-technical user would do with Claude Code. My BiL is coaching his son’s baseball team and wanted to buy some SaS that would help him plan and show his players different positions on the field. I set him up with a prompt line in Claude, showed him how to capture the screenshot and enter the prompt. In 3 rounds we had a better version of what they were selling for $200/year.

The barriers are still pretty high when it comes to nontechnical users making things that don’t turn into spaghetti after a few turns (he doesn’t even have a computer, much less know how to open a terminal and the amount of people that only have a phone/tablet is I would assume growing), but it feels like it’s coming.