Is 'Self-SaaS' the Future?
I know I've started another blog post with a question I again don't know the answer to but still wanted to jot some thoughts down while they were in my head…
The other day I was sent a link to an online webinar Anthropic were doing about some case study for Long Running Agents. I thought oo that’ll be fun to attend or watch back, when is it?
“Apr 28, 2026 — 10:00 am PTUK: 6:00 PM BST”
Right… when is that in BST?
Usually I’d open a new tab and pop it into Google and ask. However, I did the typical dev thing — why do something manually in 5 minutes when you can spend 3 hours automating it?
So I booted up OpenAI Codex and with 2 prompts and less than 15 minutes, I had a Google Chrome extension that would scan a page for dates and timezones and convert them into BST/GMT for me.
Now I could’ve looked on Google for an existing extension that inevitably does this and would’ve probably worked. But:
That’s no fun
This is now mine
I can extend it however I want. Add support for weird formats. Highlight times inline. Maybe even hook it into my calendar. Suddenly this tiny annoyance has turned into something tailored exactly to me.
This got me thinking.
I’ve read a few stories recently about devs at places like NVIDIA cancelling SaaS subscriptions and just building the tools themselves. And it’s not just individuals. Entire companies are starting to question whether they should be paying for off-the-shelf B2B SaaS when they could build something leaner, cheaper, and more aligned to their workflows.
This was my first real experience with what I’m calling Self-SaaS.
I’ve got no idea if that term already exists somewhere, but it feels like something is shifting.
Before, the decision looked like this:
Buy SaaS → instant value, minimal effort
Build it → time sink, maintenance burden, probably not worth it
Now it’s more like:
Buy SaaS → pay monthly, get a generic solution
Build it → spend 30–60 minutes, get exactly what you want
That’s a very different trade-off.
Though this isn't the first time this concept has come around, the age-old debate of closed vs open systems has existed since the dawn of computing. Apple Inc. vs Linux, paid vs free, convenience vs control.
Do you want something that just works out of the box, is polished, supported, and consistently updated?
Or do you want something you can tweak, extend, break, fix, and ultimately shape into exactly what you need?
But I don’t think this kills SaaS.
If anything, it probably makes the gap clearer.
There are still loads of problems where I don’t want to build anything:
Payments infrastructure
Identity & auth
Compliance-heavy systems
Anything where “getting it wrong” is expensive
That’s where SaaS shines. You’re paying for reliability, support, scale, and not having to think about it.
But on the other side…
There’s a huge category of “small annoyances” and “workflow glue” that sits in between:
Tiny utilities
Internal dashboards
Data transformers
Personal productivity tools
Niche integrations
That stuff used to either not get built, or you’d force-fit a SaaS product that kinda-sorta did the job.
Now? You just build it.
I feel this is a topic I could write so much more about! I'll see what comes to mind in the near future!
