20 SaaS subscriptions walk into a bar. I built all of them myself instead.

I build Pheidi Running Plans alone. It's an adaptive running training app: tell it your race and your real schedule, it builds a plan and rebuilds it when life gets in the way. One founder. No team, no contractors.

I want to share something that's quietly become the most important decision in how I build, because I think a lot of indie hackers are bleeding money they don't need to.

My default is now: build the capability into the app, don't subscribe to it.

That used to be terrible advice. "Don't build your own X" was right for my whole career, because the scarcest thing a small company had was developer time. But the math flipped. With AI coding assistants, a focused feature that was a week of work is now an afternoon. Code got cheap. Subscriptions didn't.

Here are three things indie hackers usually rent that I built instead, with real line counts from my repo.

1. Feedback system (instead of Canny/Intercom, ~$80+/mo)

A slide-out feedback form, an API endpoint, a 44-line service that saves to a table, and an email to me. ~300 lines total. No admin dashboard, on purpose. Every piece of feedback lands in my inbox, where I already live. Email gives me triage, starring, and reply-to-the-user for free. The data sits in my own database, one query away if I ever want trends.

2. Email autoresponder (instead of Mailchimp/Customer.io, $tens-to-hundreds/mo)

Five email types, all my own code: welcome, a 5 AM workout reminder in each user's timezone, training-phase emails, a day-3 check-in, a day-14 nudge. ~1,200 lines of C#: schedulers, templates, dedup, one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058, so Gmail shows its native button). I still pay Azure a fraction of a cent per email to actually send it.

That's the line I draw, and it's the whole rule: rent infrastructure, build the workflow. Delivery, DNS, hosting = commodity plumbing, rent it. The logic of who gets which email and when = product, and that's exactly what the $200/mo tools charge for. It was never hard. It was just tedious, and tedious is what AI removed.

3. Agentic AI tools (instead of bolting on an "AI feature" SaaS)

This is the one I'd push hardest right now. I built an MCP server into the app: 8 tools (log a run, report an injury, add a vacation, fetch the plan...) behind a proper OAuth 2.1 flow. A runner can manage training by talking to an AI assistant, and it adapts the plan the same as tapping the UI. The tools were 418 lines; the auth was the real work (~500 lines + a lot of RFC reading), but it's a one-time cost and now any MCP client works.

The kicker: remember the feedback system with no dashboard? When I want to understand what users want, I point a coding agent at my own database and ask in plain English. Costs a few cents of tokens against data I already own. Every SaaS dashboard is a fixed set of someone else's queries with a UI on top. An agent with raw access is every query.

What I'm NOT claiming

This works because I'm one person at a manageable scale. Got a team? A SaaS tool's permissions and audit trails might be worth every dollar. Sending a million emails a month? Deliverability is a profession, not a feature. And I'd still never build payments, email transport, or hosting. Rent infrastructure, build workflow, and infrastructure is bigger than it looks. The maintenance is also mine forever, which is why I keep these systems small.

The real lesson

I didn't avoid SaaS on principle. I did it because every subscription isn't just a bill, it's a dashboard to check, a login to manage, an integration to maintain, a data export to worry about. Twenty tools is a part-time job of overhead before any of them do anything for me.

Before you reach for the credit card, ask: is this product or is it plumbing? If it's plumbing, rent it. If it's product, it might be an afternoon to own it outright, with your data in your database, doing exactly what your app needs and nothing else.

Curious where other solo builders draw this line. What's the one SaaS subscription you'd never give up, and the one you finally cut and built yourself?