I Replaced a $120/Year SaaS in 20 Minutes: The LLM Wake-Up Call for Software Products

Gergely Orosz of The Pragmatic Engineer just demonstrated something that should concern every micro-SaaS founder: he replaced a four-year subscription to a testimonials service with LLM-generated code in exactly 20 minutes. The trigger? Broken billing and unresponsive support.

The Core Insight

The thesis that LLMs will kill SaaS has been floating around for a while, and Orosz has been skeptical—reasonably noting that products like Workday provide ongoing compliance updates, guaranteed correctness, and continuous maintenance that simple code generation can’t replicate.

But this week he experienced firsthand how that thesis applies to a specific category of SaaS: products that provide no ongoing value after initial setup.

His testimonials widget from Shoutout.io cost $120/year and did exactly one thing: display social proof quotes on his website. When the billing system broke and support sent him a non-working link, he asked himself: “Can I just build this?”

The answer was yes. Using Codex, he:
1. Created a plan to remove the third-party dependency
2. Stored testimonials in a JSON file processed at build time
3. Added build triggers for local and Netlify deployment
4. Generated a schema and tweaked the UX

By the time support finally sent a working invoice link (two hours later), he had already completed the migration.

Why This Matters

For SaaS founders:

The vulnerability isn’t “LLMs can write code”—it’s that customers with technical skills now have near-zero friction to exit. The traditional moat of “it’s not worth the engineering time to build this yourself” has eroded dramatically.

Shoutout.io was sold twice since 2020. The new owners apparently assumed they could collect passive revenue without investment. But “broken windows” that were previously tolerable annoyances now become migration triggers.

For developers:

This is actually fun. Orosz explicitly notes that he took on the project partly because he expected it to be interesting. For technical users, the combination of frustration with a vendor and curiosity about LLM capabilities creates a perfect storm for churn.

For the broader ecosystem:

We’re seeing the unbundling of SaaS along a new dimension: static vs. dynamic value.

Products that provide ongoing value—compliance updates, real-time data, alerting, analytics, integration maintenance—remain defensible. Products that configure something once and then just… sit there? Those are increasingly vulnerable.

Key Takeaways

• Orosz didn’t “rebuild Shoutout”—he rebuilt his specific use case. The full product has 10x more features, but he only needed display and easy editing.

• Developer comfort matters: Non-developers could probably do this too, but it would take longer. The command-line workflow for future updates is frictionless for devs, less so for others.

• The trigger was support failure: The technical capability to leave meant nothing until the vendor gave him a reason. A working billing system might have bought another year of inertia.

• Static SaaS is now more like shareware: If your product doesn’t change or provide ongoing value, you’re competing against the user’s ability to generate their own version.

• M&A math is changing: Buying cash-flowing SaaS products and coasting on maintenance mode may have a shorter runway than historical models suggest.

Looking Ahead

This story has clear implications for both sides of the market:

If you’re building SaaS:
– Continuous value delivery is now table stakes for retention
– “Broken windows” tolerance has collapsed for technical users
– Your moat is maintenance, compliance, and integration—not the initial feature set

If you’re buying SaaS:
– Evaluate products on ongoing value, not just initial convenience
– For static tools, consider whether LLM-generated alternatives are viable
– Factor support quality into retention calculations

The commoditization of “simple” software features was always coming. LLMs just accelerated the timeline from “someday” to “this afternoon.”

Based on analysis of “I replaced a $120/year micro-SaaS in 20 minutes with LLM-generated code” from The Pragmatic Engineer