Just saw an absolute classic observation from @gregisenberg that perfectly encapsulates the state of software in 2025:
A customer cancels a $300/month SaaS subscription… only to turn around and drop 26x that amount ($8k/mo) building a janky internal tool to replace it.
On paper, this looks like madness. Why trade a polished, venture-backed platform for a buggy, home-brewed script held together by duct tape?
Welcome to the Vibe-Coding Apocalypse.
The Rationality of “Janky”
The crazy part isn’t the cost difference. The crazy part is that in 2025, this trade-off is completely rational.
For the last decade, we lived in the era of “Rent vs. Buy.” You rented Salesforce, you rented Jira, you rented HubSpot. But renting meant adapting your workflow to their software.
Now, we are entering the era of Prompt vs. Rent.
Non-technical teams are realizing they don’t need to wait six weeks for a feature request. They can simply open a window and prompt:
“Make a dashboard showing MRR by plan, date-filtered, with CSV export and Slack alerts whenever a whale churns.”
Boom. A working prototype exists in less than 15 minutes.
Beautiful. Scalable. Do exactly what they need right this second?
Ownership > Aesthetics
We are seeing a massive shift in value perception. Teams would rather own a mediocre thing that fits their business perfectly than rent a beautiful, generic thing that fits 80% of the market.
The friction of “begging engineering” for tools is gone. The backlog is dead.
But there is a trap.
Most “vibe-coding” outputs are fragile. They are security nightmares. They lack permissions. They are, to put it lightly, throwaway code. This is where the $8k/mo maintenance cost creeps in — fixing the janky scripts that run mission-critical operations.
Enter Imagine.bo: Vibe Coding on Steroids
This is exactly why we built imagine.bo.
We recognized that the urge to build custom tools isn’t going away — it’s accelerating. But businesses can’t run on throwaway code. You need the speed of a prompt with the stability of a product.
Imagine.bo bridges the gap between the “Janky Internal Tool” and the “Polished SaaS.”
With one prompt, we don’t just generate a script; we generate a production-ready internal tool featuring:
- Your Branding: It looks like it belongs to you, not a generic AI wrapper.
- Real Data Connections: Seamless integrations with Postgres, Stripe, Snowflake, and more.
- Row-Level Permissions: So the intern doesn’t see the CEO’s salary.
- Clean Code: Outputs that developers can actually read, maintain, and extend if they want to.
The New Reality
The “janky killers” that are stealing SaaS seats are being built in under 30 minutes on our platform.
It isn’t just about saving $300/month. It’s about agility. It’s about owning your stack. It’s about telling the software what to do, rather than the software telling you how to work.
If you’re a founder watching low-end churn go brrr because your customers are vibe-coding their own replacements, you have two choices: fight the tide, or build the surfboard.
Build the replacement this afternoon at imagine.bo.
