# Build it or buy it: the SaaS tools I'd replace with AI, and the ones I still pay for Source: https://aaronmakelky.com/blog/build-or-buy-saas Last updated: 2026-10-30 Ryan Doser and I went category by category on AI Rabbit Holes: website builders, CRMs, email, schedulers, Zapier, design, video editing, notes, and meeting recorders. Here's which ones I'd vibe code and which ones I'd keep paying for. October 30, 2026 · 24 min read AI Rabbit Holes · SaaS · Vibe Coding · Claude Code · AI Tools · Cloudflare · Wispr Flow [All my AI Rabbit Holes episodes](/ai-rabbit-holes) ![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mPbezFhky80/hqdefault.jpg) Ryan Doser and me on AI Rabbit Holes, going category by category: build it or buy it. I'll look at a project and ask, should I actually take the time to build this, or should I just subscribe and pay for the thing that already exists? It's almost like, is it worth my time and tokens, or should I just pay $9.99 or $20 a month for it? I went through the usual SaaS categories with [Ryan Doser](https://ryandoser.com/) on [AI Rabbit Holes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80), recorded October 27, 2026, and we each made a call: build it or buy it. Our episodes go up on [Ryan's YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDoserAI). This one picks up from [our website stack episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRBn2YNd_nk) and [GitHub for marketers](/blog/github-for-marketers). ## Four questions before you build it [Watch this part of the episode (2:04)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=124s) Ryan's take is that opportunity cost is the ultimate question now. With Opus 5.5 and the other models, even people with mediocre technical skills can build most internal software. So it's not, can we build it? It's, should we? He brought three questions, and I added a fourth: 1. Can my AI agent already do this? 2. Is it a whole job, or just a button? In other words, does the SaaS company have a moat? 3. When did I last use this tool? 4. Who is it for: just me, me and my human team, or me and my agent team? Who's going to use this on a daily basis? It could be just you. It could be you and your team, like you work at a small business with five people in the marketing department. Or is it going to be agent accessible? I'll find stuff where I'm like, I don't like it, but it's mostly for AI tools to interface with. That's so much easier to build yourself, because I don't care about the buttons. I don't care about the design. I don't care about the human user experience. [![Table of 17 software categories with Ryan Doser's call and Aaron Makelky's call for each. Both build AI websites, skip AI writing tools, and buy email marketing and podcast recording. Aaron uses Cal.com's free plan for scheduling, a free Notion database as a CRM, cloud agents instead of Zapier and n8n, and Wispr Flow for meeting notes and dictation.](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/scorecard.png)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/scorecard.png) Every category from the episode, with Ryan's call and mine. ## AI website builders: move up the stack [Watch this part of the episode (5:22)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=322s) Ryan says build it, on the stack from our last episode: Cloudflare, GitHub, the Astro web framework, and Claude Code or Codex. He'd never touch an AI website builder right now. I have to confess, I've used these before. Thankfully, it's been a year and a half since I last touched one. If you're on one, there's nothing wrong with that, but you should move up the stack. Go up a level from where you are. People tell me all the time, I pay my Lovable subscription so my website doesn't get shut off. With domains, you have two options on these. You use a terrible domain like aaronsthing.lovable.app, with the little Lovable favicon, which is worthless. Or you put it on a custom domain with Lovable. Either way, you should not be paying 20 or 50 bucks a month to keep your website turned on once you've built it. Move it to a tool that just handles your domains. I've used [Porkbun](https://porkbun.com/) in the past. I like everything in one place, so now I do it in Cloudflare. You pay seven to ten dollars a year to own the domain, while somebody else pays 20, 30, 50 bucks a month to Lovable because they've got to keep their website up. Don't get sucked into that trap. Ryan's add: look into [Wrangler](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/), Cloudflare's command line tool, so your AI models can run Cloudflare from your terminal. ## Scheduling apps: Cal.com's free plan [Watch this part of the episode (8:15)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=495s) Ryan pays $10 a month for Calendly on the annual plan, and he says buy it. Could he vibe code a Calendly? Absolutely. But then he's saying his time is worth less than $10 a month. I hate Calendly, and I don't look down on people who use it. I get Ryan's argument. What I tell everybody is use [Cal.com on the free plan](https://cal.com/pricing). It's also [open source](https://github.com/calcom/cal.diy) if you want to go down the customize-it rabbit hole. I don't, because I'm with Ryan. I just need a link that lets people book an accurate time, in one place. [![Cal.com's pricing page. The Free plan for individuals is free forever and includes 1 user, unlimited event types and calendars, email and SMS notifications, 100 plus app integrations, a mobile app, Stripe and PayPal payments, and a one-click Calendly import. The Teams plan is 12 dollars per user per month.](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/calcom-free-plan.jpg)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/calcom-free-plan.jpg) [Cal.com's free plan](https://cal.com/pricing): one user, unlimited event types, a mobile app, and Stripe payments. The free version even has a mobile app, so you get a ding when people book you. You can set up a summer schedule versus a fall schedule. I've used it for three or four years. Everybody who's been on Calendly and tries the free version of Cal.com says it does what they need. You really only pay when you work with a team, like a meeting that routes between Ryan and me. You can even do a thousand dollar meeting people pay for with Stripe before it books. SaaS tools know this, too, and Ryan is a great example. Is it worth his time to switch to basically the same product to save $10 a month? Or is he like, dude, I could use that time on something way more important? Ryan said probably not: opportunity cost, man. ## CRMs: start with a free Notion database [Watch this part of the episode (10:53)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=653s) Ryan doesn't use a CRM; Kit, his email platform, holds his contacts. For most small, medium, and enterprise businesses, he says buy one, for the features and the security. I differ with him on this one. I see what people pay for HubSpot, and then for this feature, and then that feature. The thing I hate is per seat. They monetize stuff that doesn't cost them anything extra to provide. That's just where their profit comes from. I get it. A CRM is a lifeblood. Some businesses would rather turn off their email than turn off their CRM. I'm a big fan of using [Notion](https://www.notion.com/pricing), even the free version. You basically have a database, and you don't even have to know what that is. It's like a giant spreadsheet. Connect Claude Code or Codex to it and say, this is what I need: contact info, some sort of rating on where the lead came in, categories, sorted from most recent to furthest back. I'm not saying go build a web app and host it on Cloudflare. For most people that's not worth the headache, and it won't do all the stuff GoHighLevel or HubSpot would. But you could probably do a lot of this in a Google Sheet, an Airtable, or a Notion database. Ryan asked about a company already on HubSpot or Salesforce. No, they shouldn't switch, and they won't, and that's why HubSpot will keep raising prices. Churning to save a few thousand dollars a month isn't worth the opportunity cost when your sales guys doing more sales calls would cover the difference. The SaaS tools know this. They're priced accordingly. ## Email marketing: you're paying for deliverability [Watch this part of the episode (13:31)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=811s) Ryan pays about $115 a month for Kit, and he makes more than that off his email list, so it's a no-brainer for him. This isn't my area of expertise, but I know this. What you're really paying for with a [Beehiiv](https://www.beehiiv.com/) or a Kit is your time, and letting them handle the deliverability problem. They have full-time employees whose sole job is making sure your message shows up in somebody's main inbox, not their spam. You could find a cheaper one, like [Resend](https://resend.com/), which a lot of people use. But now you own the troubleshooting and the maintenance. Google changes something with how it filters stuff? Good luck figuring that out. I would never build my own email tool. It's more technical than simple databases and some of these web apps. And if it's not showing up where you need it, saving 50 bucks a month to have no one read your emails is not a good return on your money, let alone your time. ## Course platforms: I cloned a Kajabi site in under an hour [Watch this part of the episode (15:50)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=950s) Ryan uses [Skool](https://www.skool.com/), which is $99 a month, and he'd keep it because it's part of his business model. A Skool or a [Circle](https://circle.so/) makes sense, because part of how you get people in is that they already have the app on their phone. I've never met anybody who's only in one Skool group. They're in six or ten or twelve. A standalone site is different. I was just talking to two people about their Kajabi subscription, and they told me what it was going to cost: twenty-four hundred bucks for the base level, for a standalone website. I took [Cursor](/blog/how-to-use-cursor-automations), pointed it at their domain, and said, make me a new project to port all of this over. We'll put it in GitHub. We'll deploy it on Cloudflare. Other than affiliate codes and some of the CRM part of Kajabi, just from a URL, it made a pixel-perfect clone in less than an hour. Now you're going to have to use it to make a new page. These are convenience tools, like all SaaS. You don't even have to look at the code. You just say, I want a new landing page, and it's done. So if it's a standalone site, build it on your own. One, you're going to learn something. Two, otherwise you're tied to their pricing. Five years ago, if you weren't a web developer, you had to use Kajabi or LearnWorlds. Now you don't. And they're going to keep raising the price and adding features you don't want, to charge you more. Then you're like, man, I wish I would have just gone off on my own and ripped off the band-aid. ## Social media schedulers: can I post without opening your app? [Watch this part of the episode (18:45)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=1125s) Ryan uses Blotato, which is his client, so he's upfront that he's biased. His rule: a scheduler is worth it if you connect it to your AI systems through an MCP. If you're still copy-pasting into a web app calendar, that's a waste of time. It's just like the Kajabis. Five years ago, you really had to use one of these tools. Now I use one test: can I schedule my stuff without opening your web app? If so, I'm very open to it. I have no affiliation with any of these, but I think [Buffer has the best MCP](https://buffer.com/mcp) and the most promise. I believe in what they're building, even if it's not perfect yet, and I like how they price per channel. [![Buffer's MCP page titled Manage social media using an AI agent, with a chat asking an AI assistant to review the last six months of Buffer posts and find which got the most engagement](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/buffer-mcp.jpg)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/buffer-mcp.jpg) [Buffer's MCP](https://buffer.com/mcp): drafting and scheduling posts from Claude or ChatGPT. If you can say, hey Claude, post it, or connect it to your database of content and have it automate, great. That's saving you time. But if I have to go to buffer.com or hootsuite.com, look at some stupid calendar, and upload my video, I could have just uploaded it to LinkedIn. There's a lot of argument over whether schedulers hurt your reach. There's no definitive answer, but if you only post through one, it definitely doesn't help. I've seen it on my own accounts, on company channels I've managed, and on new accounts. You've got to spend some time on there organically. A browser extension like Claude or GPT in Chrome can use LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook on your desktop and mimic a human uploading. Sprout Social is the ultimate: we're going to charge you $2,000 a seat for something that costs them five dollars a month to run. I used it on a team, saw what we were paying, and was shocked. But do you want to change, retrain people, and go talk to a sales rep? Just pay it. That's a recurring theme with these SaaS tools. They know you won't, so they keep charging you. Ryan raised security: a scheduler's API connections are probably safer than his own, since he has no cybersecurity background. And what does it cost you to get your LinkedIn or Twitter account banned because you did something wrong? Part of what you pay Buffer for is trusting them not to screw it up, which is very valid. ## Zapier and n8n: use the cloud agent you already pay for [Watch this part of the episode (22:39)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=1359s) Ryan doesn't use Zapier, n8n, or Make anymore. He sets up scheduled actions and cron jobs in the ChatGPT or Claude desktop apps and VS Code. He does think Zapier and n8n still have a moat with enterprise companies that want boring, reliable automations. I haven't touched one of these in years. I think it's beautiful that so many of us learned on them. I remember studying n8n and watching YouTube videos, like, ooh, I can connect this to this to this. But back then, not every app had an API. That was kind of rare. And we didn't have a bunch of cloud agents. Something I tell people all the time: I bet you're already paying for a tool, like ChatGPT Work, Claude, or Grok Bot, that has a virtual machine somewhere. That's the perfect place to run these things in the cloud, without needing your laptop open to trigger them. Five years ago, Zapier made sense. Today, it doesn't. More on that in [how to automate the non-creative parts of your creative job](/blog/automate-non-creative-work). Ryan's point is that MCP and CLI connections took away a lot of these platforms' moat. I have a [personal API](/tools/personal-api). When people plug my stuff into an agent to book a meeting or find out where my website is, there's a page on my own domain that's just for agents to read. I tell them, send this to Claude, it'll tell you what you need to know. It's funny that people would still pay for a tool to do that. [![Aaron Makelky's Personal API page, titled Apparently my coffee order needed an API, with five small endpoints for booking time, getting hands-on AI help, ordering his coffee, checking his shirt size, or sending a question, at the base URL /api/personal](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/personal-api.jpg)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/personal-api.jpg) My [Personal API](/tools/personal-api): five endpoints people and agents can read without logging in. ## AI writing tools: the same models with a system prompt [Watch this part of the episode (25:10)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=1510s) Ryan's first taste of AI was Jarvis, now Jasper, around 2020 or 2021. Today he calls tools like Jasper, Copy.ai, and Writesonic complete scams, because a $20 a month Claude or ChatGPT subscription gets you more usage, the best models, and your own skills and context. Tell me how you really feel. That's the best part of this show: you get the unadulterated version. Where these tools are big is actually academia. There's a whole niche of them that sell to students to beat AI writing detectors. I remember seeing Ryan's content years ago, so I'm going to assume his use case was landing pages and marketing copy that didn't sound like GPT, back when GPT and Claude 3.5 sucked at that. But all these tools are is the same models with a system prompt that says write like this. If you know what you want and can describe it, or even better, give it examples, like landing pages you enjoy or things you wrote before you used AI, you can get the exact same output from your own AI subscription. For students, if all you're trying to do is beat an AI detector, there are tools that work. I'm not going to name them. It's not something I want to endorse. People will pay, it's capitalism, and that's beautiful, but I don't want to be engaged in it. The problem is you only beat the detector. If someone actually steps back and reads it, sometimes it's really dumbed-down, nonsensical copy. It just doesn't get flagged as AI. That's still not a win to me. I have a GitHub skill for this, [AI Writing Audit](https://github.com/a-makelky/ai-writing-audit). It doesn't detect AI. It looks for common patterns in AI writing, flags them, and gives you a change log: this is what it said before, and here's what I fixed. Take five minutes to build yourself a version of that, or fork mine, and it'll be human enough that it doesn't put people off. In all my talks about this, obvious AI slop patterns are the turnoff. It's not, is it AI or not? It's, is it low-effort AI or not? [![Aaron Makelky's public GitHub repo ai-writing-audit, described as checks written text for common signs of AI-generated writing, suggests fixes, and creates a change log, with an MIT license, 11 stars, and a README titled AI Writing Audit](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/ai-writing-audit-repo.jpg)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/ai-writing-audit-repo.jpg) My [AI Writing Audit](https://github.com/a-makelky/ai-writing-audit) skill on GitHub. Fork it and make it yours. ## AI SEO tools: Claude Code plus Search Console first [Watch this part of the episode (29:35)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=1775s) Ryan's opinion on these has changed in the past few weeks. He pointed to a report from Nozzle that Google is poisoning the search results it shows bots and scrapers, the ones tools like Ahrefs and Semrush pull from. If you're doing SEO at scale for multiple clients, he says Ahrefs can still pay for itself. If not, he'd look at DataForSEO for about a fourth of the price. I have to admit some of my talks with Ryan behind the scenes are about this exact subject, because he knows way more than me. But for people who are just starting or experimenting: Claude Code plus [Google Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console/about). When I get an email from Search Console about an issue, I literally forward it to an agent and say, fix this. I get a PR, and I just merge it. That's not an enterprise checkout page or a product making millions of dollars. That's not my expertise. There's a level you can get to with something you already pay for, like Claude Code or Codex, if you know what you want and you connect it to your site. Make this more readable for agents. Help me rank for these keywords. Look at the metadata on my blog posts. Past that is where Ryan's tools come in. You'll probably need a one-off tool, and it's worth it. Ryan uses the Search Console MCP, Bing Webmaster Tools, and GA4 before any paid tool, and he's never been a fan of AI visibility trackers, because LLM answers change too much from one day to the next. I completely agree. Usually they're selling snake oil to people who don't understand it and figure, well, it must work, because I paid a lot for it. I've seen that from people, even some consultants in that space. ## AI image and video tools: Krea and HeyGen [Watch this part of the episode (33:54)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2034s) Ryan builds his own: he plugs an OpenRouter API key, or the API for a specific model, into his setup instead of handcuffing himself to a Higgsfield subscription. I think most people can't relate to Ryan there. For someone on his level, I agree. But for a lot of the people I work with, and some of my own projects, [Krea](https://www.krea.ai/) is a good option. I also have to say Higgsfield is very off-putting to me as a marketer. I think they're scammy. Some of the stuff they've done on social media is super sketchy. I just don't want to give them my money. I'm not saying their product is bad. Some tools that came into this space are actually pretty good. [HeyGen](https://www.heygen.com/) used to just do avatar videos. Now they have a voice model and some of their own models coming out. If there's a tool you already work in, and [Descript](https://www.descript.com/) is another one, it's sometimes worth paying 10 or 20 bucks to generate in the app, instead of getting an API key, outputting from VS Code, and importing into Descript or HeyGen where you edit. So the time trade-off Ryan talked about is actually a reason I use some of these platforms. I used HeyGen's voice model when it came out two weeks ago, and I was blown away. I showed somebody a video with a voiceover, and they asked, did you hire a voice actor? It sounded that human. The voiceover for the one-minute video cost four cents. Ryan's reaction: bye bye, ElevenLabs moat. It's an arms race. ElevenLabs released a new model since then that I haven't tried. But paying can be worth it, because piecing a system together takes time and effort. Once it breaks, if you don't know how to fix it, you're thinking, I should have just used HeyGen or Krea. ## Design tools: I still pay for Figma for live whiteboards [Watch this part of the episode (36:24)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2184s) Ryan won't pay for Photoshop or Canva Pro anymore. He makes his YouTube thumbnails, blog images, infographics, and social graphics with ChatGPT Images 2.5 on a $20 a month ChatGPT Plus plan. Are you collaborating with other people, especially live? Designers are going to keep using [Figma](https://www.figma.com/). I have so many friends who are like, I don't mess with these tools. You hear noise like, [Claude Design](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs) is going to kill Figma. Maybe for solo contractor and entrepreneur types like Ryan and me. Number one, Figma's expensive. Number two, it's a legacy tool built for designers. I'm not a designer. I just have five design tasks a week. If you're not collaborating live in a team, you probably already pay for something that does this. Claude Design is actually really good. I used it last week to make a slide deck for an important presentation, and it looked as good as or better than if I'd made it by hand in PowerPoint or Canva. My biggest complaint with Figma, besides the pricing, is that it's not designed to work well with agents. The MCP isn't well integrated into the product, because they don't want you to leave. They want you in the desktop app. There are some AI-native ones. [Pencil](https://www.pen.dev/) is one example, for a designer who always works with an AI agent, or a guy like me who isn't a designer but needs a landing page, a visual, or a slide deck. Those work really well. But no big company like Dropbox or Zapier is going to cancel Figma for all its designers and switch to some vibe-coded thing. The biggest thing I use Figma and Canva for is live whiteboards. I love workshops where people move around a whiteboard and drop sticky notes. I can't vibe code that reliably in three hours. I'm just going to pay for Figma and keep using it. ## Video editing: CapCut on my phone, agents on my desktop [Watch this part of the episode (39:57)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2397s) Ryan does his recording and editing in Riverside now, with his own Claude skills on the Riverside MCP, so Riverside's servers handle the rendering. I separate it into desktop and mobile, and mobile's really easy. Nobody can touch [CapCut](https://www.capcut.com/). I pay for Pro, and 99% of my use is on my phone. There's nothing else on a phone that does more than editing inside Instagram or TikTok, and sometimes I want more than that. Desktop is different. I paid the one time for [DaVinci Resolve Studio](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/studio), solely so my agent could write scripts for it through a community MCP. But I still do most of my editing with free tools, because they're so good. HeyGen has a really good one called [HyperFrames](https://hyperframes.heygen.com/). You just tell your Claude, your Codex, your Grok Bot, whatever: use HyperFrames to do this. It can run on a virtual machine, like the ones ChatGPT Work and Grok Bot have. [![The HyperFrames Studio home page: The video editor built for agents, with a download button and the install command npx skills add heygen-com/hyperframes](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/hyperframes-studio.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/hyperframes-studio.jpg) [HyperFrames](https://hyperframes.heygen.com/), HeyGen's free video editor for agents. We record this podcast in Riverside for a reason. We're collaborating live, and if an app screwed up a recording, that would be a huge waste of time and money for both of us. I just want to yap, turn it off, and get a nice file. But I don't want to edit in Riverside. That's my biggest negative on them: I don't like their editing tools. I like how they built the MCP. It just can't do everything I need. Here's how I edit clips from this show. I export the timeline we recorded in Riverside, which is great, and I'm happy to pay for that. Then I put it in a tool like HyperFrames or [Tesseract](https://mirage.app/tesseract), from the team behind the Captions app, and do all my editing there: motion graphics, captions, background music, the cuts. I do it all in Claude or Codex. I don't want to scrub through a timeline in your interface by hand. My agent skill can do 99% of that for me. So I want it out of your app, including Descript. The full workflow is in my notes on [AI video editing with Claude](/blog/ai-video-editing-with-claude) and my [one-shot edit with Tesseract](/blog/one-shot-video-edit-claude-tesseract). ## Podcast recording: pay for live and collaborative [Watch this part of the episode (43:15)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2595s) Ryan says buy it, for the live recording alone. He'll pay 20 to 50 bucks a month for [Riverside](https://www.riverside.com/) or Descript any day. One nuance: collaborative live recording and streaming. Let's say Ryan and I try to vibe code a Riverside-like experience, the two of us recording and streaming to LinkedIn and Twitter live. Dude, just pay 50 bucks a month, or whatever it costs. It's worth it. Getting five people on remotely is a complicated thing. I get tagged on the Twitter threads all the time: I vibe coded a Descript killer over the weekend, and it's open source. For one person doing a screen recording and some basic editing, you've been able to do that for years. If you're paying a subscription just for that, you probably should build it. But that's not what we use these tools for. ## Notes and docs: free Notion and free Obsidian [Watch this part of the episode (44:48)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2688s) Ryan says build it: make a private GitHub repo, store your markdown files there, and connect it to your AI system. You get the same thing as the Obsidian brain diagrams all over social media, for free. At one point I was on an enterprise Notion plan and also had my own business plan, paying $24 a month just for the cheaper one, and I was happy with it. Give Notion credit. As AI tools improved, they made their platform really accessible. If you want to bring Claude Code and skip the Notion agent, it's actually really good. I'm on the free Notion plan now. Here's why I stay with it instead of building my own: my agents use it together. Claude Code might be working on one thing in a database while Grok Bot writes a file over here. I don't want the headache of replacing an already good free app just to say I have my own. I also use the free version of [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), synced to my devices through GitHub. I basically asked Claude Code how I could do this without paying 10 bucks a month for their cloud. You can use iCloud too. But man, if you're on Evernote: I remember 2015, or whenever it was cool. Great. Since Bending Spoons bought it and tripled the prices, you should not be using a legacy notes-only app. Hit export, get a zipped file, give it to an AI agent, and say, this is what I want to use my notes for. What should I use, or should I build my own? ## Project management: Linear as a context layer [Watch this part of the episode (47:28)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2848s) Ryan says a company with multiple employees already on Monday.com, ClickUp, or Asana shouldn't vibe code its own. As a solopreneur, he'd build his own AI marketing OS instead. I've had a real love-hate relationship with these tools. Once upon a time, I was deep into Todoist, and my wife and I used TickTick for family stuff, pre-AI. It was amazing. I'm not a fan anymore. The one I've put a lot of my stuff in is [Linear](https://linear.app/). Traditionally it's project management for a software company: what's the developer working on, now what does the marketing person need, passing tasks back and forth. I didn't like it for that. Now I have my own account, and I use it with my agents as a context layer. [![Aaron's Agent coordination project in Linear, with issues grouped into In Progress, Todo, Backlog, and Done. Issues carry labels like agent=, harness=, and model=, linked pull requests, and Finished agent sessions next to Aaron's avatar.](/images/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace/agent-coordination-project.jpg)](/images/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace/agent-coordination-project.jpg) My agent coordination project in Linear, where each issue says which agent worked it. Claude messed up a job yesterday. It got a privacy flag about a copyright. I just took that Linear ticket, AAR-555 or whatever it was, gave it to Grok, and said, finish what Claude wouldn't. And it was done. I didn't have to prompt it, send links, or connect anything. The setup is in [I gave every AI agent its own Linear account](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace). So I'm big on it if you use it for more than task management. The way I did tasks before was a markdown file in a GitHub repo: cross this off, what's next? And I don't even have to see it. ## Meeting recorders and voice dictation: why I pay for Wispr Flow [Watch this part of the episode (49:32)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=2972s) Ryan wouldn't build a meeting recorder. He'd look for a free one first, like the note taker that comes with his Calendly plan or Gemini's. I don't think cost is what you should base this on. I think it's privacy. The only time I advocate building your own meeting recorder is something like an attorney doing depositions, or somebody working under an NDA who needs an audit trail of every tool that touches the recording. Claude can build one in five minutes with about $2 worth of tokens. You download some small model, and it's 90% as good as Fathom or Wispr Flow, but nothing else touches it. People flame me all the time for this one: the best meeting recorder there is, SaaS-wise, is [Wispr Flow](https://wisprflow.ai/pricing). It's amazing. Is it great privacy-wise? No. Do I care? Also no. I do a little voice dictation with it, but I actually use it for my meeting notes, because Gemini doesn't work in Zoom. Gemini doesn't work in the random Microsoft Teams meeting Bob invited me to last Tuesday. I like Wispr Flow because it's on all my devices, including my phone. I can do a meeting note with myself while I'm rambling in the car. A lot of these tools are adding that. The only reason I'd use [Granola](https://www.granola.ai/) is its Apple Watch app. Otherwise, you can find a tool that does meeting notes and something else just as well, for the same price. [![Wispr Flow's pricing page on annual billing: Free at 0 dollars a month, Pro at 12 dollars per user per month, Growth at 18 dollars per user per month, and Enterprise at custom pricing, free on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/wispr-flow-pricing.jpg)](/images/blog/build-or-buy-saas/wispr-flow-pricing.jpg) [Wispr Flow's plans](https://wisprflow.ai/pricing). It's free on Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android. On voice dictation, Ryan owns [VoiceInk](https://tryvoiceink.com/), which he bought once for $25 to use on his Mac. If you're on one device, he'd go that route or build your own. Some of those tools are better and faster. I use Wispr Flow because I want the same thing on my iPhone as on my Mac. If I were only on a Mac, I'd build my own or use one of the one-time tools. [Handy](https://handy.computer/) is cool, but it doesn't work on my phone. I'm not smart enough to make an iPhone app just for myself, and I don't want to pay the hundred dollar developer fee to put it in the App Store. I paid seventy-two bucks a year for Wispr Flow, and I'm more than happy. Ironically, it didn't have meeting notes when I bought it. It's not great on the iPhone, because you have to swipe between apps to turn it on, but I use it all the time on desktop, and for all of my meeting notes now. I'd pay for it just for the meeting notes. ## Is your SaaS tool AI friendly? [Watch this part of the episode (54:53)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80&t=3293s) Ryan's recap was a line from his slides: buy the pipe, build the brain. SaaS isn't dead. Just because you can build your own version doesn't mean you should, and you won't know how many headaches it causes until you go down that path. Here's what I tell people about SaaS tools: look at how AI friendly they're making their product. If they're not adding an MCP, if they're not letting you connect Claude to it, that's when you start thinking about what to replace it with, a different SaaS tool or your own build. Take one Ryan and I are huge fans of, and they don't sponsor us. Maybe they should. Cloudflare's web app has an insanely complicated sidebar, and I never know where to find stuff. But they basically said anything you can do in the app, your agent can do from a terminal. Are most people going to use that? Probably not yet. But I've got to think agents are going to use Cloudflare more than humans do. Mine already do, 99% of the time. I can buy a domain or put up a new landing page without leaving Claude Code. Some of these tools are trying to lock you in, and you'll be stuck paying a lot more money, wishing you'd switched sooner. Others let you choose. GitHub is another one. I almost never look at GitHub. It's for my AI tools, and I'll keep using it even more. My number of commits is up something like a thousand percent from last year, now that I've learned to use it with AI. [![Aaron Makelky's GitHub contribution graph showing 3,610 contributions in a year, mostly empty squares at the start and darker green squares through the spring and summer of 2026](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-contributions.jpg)](/images/blog/github-for-marketers/github-contributions.jpg) My GitHub contribution graph since I started using it with AI. Ryan put it this way: if a SaaS company doesn't have an MCP, CLI, or API integration, it's dead to him. More on that in [Your AI app should not own your work](/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work). If it's not live and collaborative, you can probably build it yourself. So then you have to decide: is it worth the time and the tokens, or do you let somebody else maintain it and just pay the $19.99 a month? If you want help deciding which of your tools to keep, [book a 30-minute call with me](https://cal.com/aaron-makelky/intro). I'm also [@theaaron on X](https://x.com/theaaron). ## Related pages - [All field notes](/blog) - [Our GitHub for marketers episode](/blog/github-for-marketers) - [How to use Cursor Automations](/blog/how-to-use-cursor-automations) - [How to automate the non-creative parts of your creative job](/blog/automate-non-creative-work) - [My Personal API](/tools/personal-api) - [AI video editing with Claude](/blog/ai-video-editing-with-claude) - [A one-shot video edit with Tesseract](/blog/one-shot-video-edit-claude-tesseract) - [I gave every AI agent its own Linear account](/blog/linear-multi-agent-workspace) - [Your AI app should not own your work](/blog/your-ai-app-should-not-own-your-work) - [Meeting Note Clerk](/tools/meeting-note-clerk) - [All AI Rabbit Holes episodes](/ai-rabbit-holes) ## Sources and references - [Ryan Doser](https://ryandoser.com/) - [Ryan Doser on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@RyanDoserAI) - [Watch the episode on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbezFhky80) - [Our website stack episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRBn2YNd_nk) - [Cal.com pricing](https://cal.com/pricing) - [Notion pricing](https://www.notion.com/pricing) - [Buffer MCP](https://buffer.com/mcp) - [AI Writing Audit on GitHub](https://github.com/a-makelky/ai-writing-audit) - [HyperFrames by HeyGen](https://hyperframes.heygen.com/) - [Tesseract by Mirage](https://mirage.app/tesseract) - [Claude Design](https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-design-anthropic-labs) - [Wispr Flow pricing](https://wisprflow.ai/pricing) - [Cloudflare Wrangler](https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/wrangler/) - [Aaron on X (@theaaron)](https://x.com/theaaron) ## Common questions ### What should you ask before vibe coding your own version of a SaaS tool? Ryan Doser asks three questions: can my AI agent already do this, is it a whole job or just a button, and when did I last use this tool. Aaron Makelky adds a fourth: who is it for? A tool only you and your agents use is much easier to build, because you don't care about the buttons, the design, or the human user experience. ### Which SaaS tools does Aaron still pay for? Email marketing, because you're paying a company like Beehiiv or Kit to handle deliverability. Live, collaborative podcast recording, like Riverside. Figma, for live workshop whiteboards. CapCut Pro, for editing on his phone. And Wispr Flow, at $72 a year, because he wants the same dictation and meeting notes on his iPhone and his Mac. ### Can you use Notion as a free CRM? Aaron says yes for most small businesses. A Notion database works like a giant spreadsheet, and with Claude Code or Codex connected you can ask for contact info, a rating on where each lead came in, categories, and a most-recent-first sort. He wouldn't build a CRM web app, and he doesn't expect a company already on HubSpot or Salesforce to switch. ### Do you still need Zapier or n8n? Aaron hasn't touched one in years. When people learned on those tools, not every app had an API and there weren't cloud agents. Now most people already pay for a tool like ChatGPT Work, Claude, or Grok Bot that has a virtual machine, which can run automations in the cloud without a laptop open. Ryan Doser says Zapier and n8n still have a moat with enterprise companies. ### When should you replace a SaaS tool? Aaron looks at how AI friendly the tool is making its product. If it isn't adding an MCP or letting you connect Claude to it, start thinking about a different tool or your own build. His other rule: if it's not live and collaborative, you can probably build it yourself, and then you decide whether that's worth the time and the tokens.