Build vs. buy in 2026: how a solo dev replaced 6 SaaS tools with ~$100/mo of AI

Dev.to / 6/15/2026

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Key Points

The author argues that build-vs-buy advice has become outdated in 2026 because AI can replace “a week of typing” with “an afternoon of prompting and review,” shifting the main bottleneck from engineering time to evaluation effort.
Running solo for an adaptive training app, they report that their total AI-related costs (assistant pairing plus agent token usage) are about $100 per month, whereas the six SaaS tools they replaced would each cost a similar amount and scale up on renewals.
They describe building replacement capabilities such as feedback handling themselves—using a small ASP.NET Core/Blazor component and an API that persists submissions to their own Azure SQL—rather than paying SaaS subscriptions that add third-party widgets and store key user signals off-platform.
Their approach emphasizes architectural decisions filtered through the question “can one person own this forever?” and includes practical implementation choices like persisting data first and sending notifications asynchronously to avoid blocking requests.

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