Home grown product isn't going to match a saas product's features. But you dont need most of it anyway. so home grown gets the job done. Till it hits entropy or the roi is gone. Problems will show up a few months / years down till it isn't worth the effort or the savings.
Saas products that survive this AI wave are going to come out stronger on the other end.
Yes, we are picking up a maintenance burden but the 10x price increase in our case made it a very easy cost/benefit equation, and I decided that as a primary technology in a consulting business it was worth controlling it.
Trying to understand what the LLMs mean to the saas world. Will you have to become a time tracking/invoicing pro? Where’s the break even I wonder.
I've vibe-rebuilt several apps for myself and after a certain point I don't feel like anything is missing so I just stop touching it entirely except to fix a rare bug here and there.
But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.
Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).
We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.