I’ve seen a good number of post along the lines of “All you will have in future is your claude subscription and infrastructure costs”. This is because AI can just create it all for you.
We have started to see this recently. Pieter Levels vibe coded loads of services he previously paid for, saving “about $25,000 per month”. Heres the full list of what he replaced:
- Weather API -> My own vibe coded weather service using Norway’s meteorology API
- Image resizing API -> My own vibe coded image resizing API with NodeJS’s Sharp + Redis (saves ~$1,500/mo)
- Google Vision NSFW detection -> My own $0/mo vibe coded NSFW detection service with Python’s NudeNET (saves ~$2,500/mo)
- Cloudflare Streaming -> My own $0/mo Nginx VPS video streaming (saves ~$250/mo)
- API Flash -> My own $0/mo screenshot service (for social images) (saves ~$250/mo)
- New Relic + IPHub -> My own $0/mo error monitoring, DDOS blocking and fleet management service (called error2telegram) (saves ~$250/mo)
- Human moderators -> My own moderation on all my sites with @xAI (saves ~$10,000/mo)
- IFTTT -> Telegram bot (saves ~$100/mo)
- Photopea as editor inside Photo AI -> Vibe coded my own photo editor (saves ~$100/mo)
- Mapbox -> Vibecoded my own free replacement with OpenFreeMaps (saves ~$500/mo)
- Uptimerobot -> My own $5/mo Uptime Canary app running on Kuma (saves ~$50/mo)
- Ghost blog -> My own $0/mo blog platform
- Customer support -> @featurebasehq + AI support bot (saves $5,000/mo)
- Scrapingbee/SerpAPI -> My own $1/mo scraper with Patchright (save ~$250/mo)
I think I have reached my final limit of replacing my SaaS services as I have these left, but that’d mean becoming an ICANN registrar (I don’t want 😁), managing my own email (I don’t want), managing my own hard drives at home in a storage (I don’t want) and managing my own servers at home too (I don’t want) and running my own GPU rig at home (I don’t want):
- Cloudflare Domains
- Cloudflare Email Sending
- Cloudflare R2 Storage
- Backblaze B2 for backups
- Hetzner for all my servers for all my sites (VPS)
- xAI for all LLMs for all my sites (so many things like moderation, writing emails, anything)
In a world where it is now easy for AI to generate the products we use, I see the uptake of free open source solutions to only increase. The real competition will be who’s doing it the cheapest if it requires external resources.
And that’s where I look at the AI companies now. Sure they are what we all use today, but the chinese models aren’t far behind and constantly catching up. So when we want to cut prices, surely it will inevitably be cheaper to use a free open source AI model, with a free open source harness, on the cheapest inference servers you can get your hands on. So all you’re really paying for is the physical infrastructure costs.
The funny thing is, I really don’t think we are far from that reality either.
As always in all this. the best business is in something physical. Someone needs to physically host and manage this infrastructure.
I don’t see any moats around AI services when they charge a premium to use their models. If the job can be done cheaper using the free AI models, it inevitably will be used.