How levelsio Replaced 14 SaaS Tools with Vibe-Coded Services
Built by @levelsio · · Source: X
Result: About $25,000/mo in savings, according to @levelsio. His self-built scraper costs ~$1/mo instead of $249/mo, with a success rate of about 90%.
What they built
@levelsio says he has replaced 14 SaaS products and services used across his sites with tools he built himself by vibe coding. The list includes:
- Weather: his own service built on Norway's meteorology API
- Image resizing: an API using NodeJS's Sharp and Redis
- NSFW detection: a service built on Python's NudeNET, replacing Google Vision
- Video streaming: Nginx on a VPS, replacing Cloudflare Streaming
- Monitoring: error2telegram, a tool he built for error monitoring, DDOS blocking and fleet management, replacing New Relic and IPHub
- Moderation and support: xAI models handle moderation on his sites in place of human moderators, and customer support runs on Featurebase plus an AI support bot
- Other swaps: a Telegram bot instead of IFTTT, his own photo editor instead of Photopea, OpenFreeMaps instead of Mapbox, Uptime Kuma instead of Uptimerobot, his own blog platform instead of Ghost, and a screenshot service instead of API Flash
How it works
Most items come with only a one-line description. The scraper is the exception, and he explains it in more detail. He says OpenSERP got blocked because it runs a vanilla headless Chrome, and tainted residential proxies didn't help either. What worked was Playwright driving a real Google Chrome on his VPS. It runs headful with a persistent context, makes requests slowly (about one every 30 seconds) and uses better residential IPs that he won't name.
Some services he says he doesn't want to run himself: domains, email sending, storage, backups, servers (Hetzner) and LLMs (xAI).
The result
@levelsio estimates the savings at about $25,000/mo. He says the largest items are moderation (~$10,000/mo), support (~$5,000/mo) and NSFW detection (~$2,500/mo). He says the scraper reaches about a 90% success rate, which he calls similar to or better than Scrapingbee, for ~$1/mo instead of $249/mo.
How to build something similar
- List your SaaS bills by cost and start with the expensive ones that do a narrow, well-defined job.
- Look for open-source libraries or free public data sources that already do the core work, and use an AI coding agent to build a thin service around them.
- Before you cancel the paid tool, run your replacement alongside it and compare reliability. Scraping and anti-bot workarounds especially can stop working without warning.
- Choose on purpose what you won't self-host. Email, domains and hardware can cost more in upkeep than they save.
The original post
✨ I replaced all these SaaS with my own vibe coded now, so about $25,000/mo savings: - 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) [Quoted post from @levelsio]: ✨ Okay with lots of help from @javilopen and his Spanish scraping friends I've managed to vibe code my own @Scrapingbee alternative and replace my $249/mo Scrapingbee plan with my own $1/mo scraper running on my VPS! First I tried OpenSERP, an open source project that seems freshly maintained but it didn't work on my VPS IP or laptop IP and got blocked fast Then I tried to use residential IP proxies from IPRoyal but they were already quite tainted IPs meaning Google already knew they were scrapers and just blocked about 60% of them already, not so great, also didn't work! Then I discovered OpenSERP uses a vanilla headless Chrome, Google instantly detects that and blocks that, so literally the entire repo is useless cause it won't even work? I don't get why they don't say that in the docs? OpenSERP is even worse than just basic CURL, as my AI said: "plain curl got 7% blocked but OpenSERP's headless browser got 100% blocked" So then I just built my own with Playwright and a real Google Chrome on my VPS, headful and persistent context, and slow pacing like every 30 seconds or so And I got some better residential IP recommendations (which I can't tell you because thenhey t stop working!) Now I'm at about 90% success rate, which is similar or better than Scrapingbee And it costs me ~$1/mo (measured by GBs, obviously for text scraping I barely use a lot) instead of the $249/mo I paid Scrapingbee! My only remaining SaaS now are: - 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)
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