✨ I replaced all these SaaS with my own vibe coded now, so about...
@levelsio@levelsio
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Sep 09, 2026
~2 min read
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✨ 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)
- 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)
@levelsio@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)
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)