In the past 8 months, we replaced a significant part of our SaaS tools with custom solutions built in evenings and weekends, cutting thousands in costs while shipping faster than ever.
Eight months ago I wrote this LinkedIN post:
"In about a week of work, we've replaced Intercom with our own home grown customer support tools."
The comment section and reactions on this post were an interesting mix of curiosity, disbelieve, and folks explaining me that this didn't make sense and that I should focus.
And 8 months later....
I've done about a dozen of these side projects, cutting thousands of euros in monthly subscriptions and fees, while improving our product experience.
We replaced in-app notifications with a home-grown solution, simplified our analytics stack with one single provider and custom dashboards, continuously improved our support content, and built a native SDK that now powers support in multiple apps at a fraction of the cost, and much more.
If I can build and deploy a custom dashboard faster than you can build it out in your SAAS tool, its time to reimagine your interface.
And all of this was done on in evenings, between a design and an engineering meeting, or a random Sunday afternoon.
Our product improved, our costs went down, and the cost to build and maintain these custom solutions is a fraction of what we paid for usage and subscriptions. Our cost savings for this year alone can hire us a full-time rockstar engineer...
Eight months later, my point stands even more. The impact on our work got even bigger when we shifted from building internal tools, prototypes and utilities, to shipping new features with thousands of lines of code to production at insane speed. We supercharged our team and building better product, faster than we ever did.
What a great time to build.
