Add up your monthly software subscriptions. Go on, actually look. Project management, invoicing, scheduling, CRM, email marketing, social media scheduling, design tools, analytics dashboards. For most solo consultants, it's somewhere between £200 and £500 per month—£2,400 to £6,000 per year—flowing out to companies that are renting you access to functionality you could easily own by vibe coding it yourself.

The "No API, No Buy" philosophy isn't just about integration capability. It's also about recognising when a subscription is solving a problem that a vibe-coded tool could solve permanently.

The Subscription Audit

Not every subscription is replaceable. Some tools provide genuine, irreplaceable value (Notion's database architecture, Stripe's payment infrastructure, your email hosting). The goal isn't to eliminate all subscriptions—it's to identify the ones where you're paying for a thin wrapper around basic functionality.

Replaceable with vibe coding:

  • Simple scheduling pages (Calendly alternatives)
  • Basic CRM and lead tracking
  • Client intake forms
  • Portfolio and landing pages
  • Content calendars and editorial workflows
  • Invoice generation for straightforward billing
  • Analytics dashboards that aggregate data from APIs you already use

Not easily replaceable:

  • Complex payment processing (Stripe, Wise)
  • Deep database infrastructure (Notion, Airtable)
  • Professional video editing (Descript, DaVinci Resolve)
  • Email deliverability infrastructure (SendGrid, Postmark)

The Math

A scheduling tool costs roughly £10-15/month. Over three years, that's £360-540. A vibe-coded scheduling page that connects to your Google Calendar API costs nothing to build, and hosting on Vercel's free tier costs nothing to run.

Scale that logic across five or six replaceable tools, and you're recovering £1,000-2,000 per year. More importantly, you own the tools. Nobody can raise the price, change the features, or shut down the service.

The Sovereignty Angle

Every SaaS tool you use has your data. Your client list, your booking history, your invoice records, your content calendar. If the company gets acquired, pivots, or simply decides to raise prices by 300%, your options are "pay up" or "start over."

Self-built tools running on your own infrastructure—even if "your infrastructure" is just a Vercel deployment connected to a Notion database—give you data sovereignty. You control the data, the functionality, and the roadmap.

This is not about being anti-SaaS. It's about being intentional about which subscriptions provide irreplaceable value and which are just convenience taxes that a competent AI coding tool can eliminate.