It took me about 10 days to update an existing business app that I used to include functionality replacing harvest time tracking, invoicing (with a far superior QBO sync, saving us days of people time per month), and forecasting (Forecast was never well integrated with Harvest).

Yes, we are picking up a maintenance burden but the 10x price increase in our case made it a very easy cost/benefit equation, and I decided that as a primary technology in a consulting business it was worth controlling it.

How much time do you expect you’ll spend improving it? In other words, are you going to keep adding features?

Trying to understand what the LLMs mean to the saas world. Will you have to become a time tracking/invoicing pro? Where’s the break even I wonder.

If it's an internal app, you stop adding features when you have all the features you need.

I've vibe-rebuilt several apps for myself and after a certain point I don't feel like anything is missing so I just stop touching it entirely except to fix a rare bug here and there.

I have a long list of features to add to the app, things that Harvest and Forecast never did to help me plan and run the business. It’s worth noting that 100% of our payments are ACH so I did not have to do Stripe integration or other payment processor integration.

But we were finally able to model the notion of the “prime contractor” which is a part of our business. Sometimes we have both an end-client and an intermediary (prime contractor) for the same project, meaning different legal entities for the bill-to and ship-to entities. We had workarounds in Harvest and QuickBooks for this but now it’s directly modeled into our app and it saves us a lot of them.

Time tracking and invoicing are unavoidable complexity in a consulting business, particularly at scale when you’re spending lots of time dealing with edge cases like invoice reinsurance (driven by time card mistakes, changes to purchase order numbers, or the need to move time from one purchase order to another).

We’ll probably have some weeks where we need to spend 2-8 hours to maintain the Harvest/Forecast functionality. And other (most?) weeks where we spend no time. The real takeaway here is we finally have a tool that perfectly models our business, and saves days of person-effort every month. It will probably allow us to delay hiring incremental operations personnel. That alters the break even calculation significantly.

Its a problem but it isn't.

Home grown product isn't going to match a saas product's features. But you dont need most of it anyway. so home grown gets the job done. Till it hits entropy or the roi is gone. Problems will show up a few months / years down till it isn't worth the effort or the savings.

Saas products that survive this AI wave are going to come out stronger on the other end.

I argued this before. I think it makes no sense for eg an estate agents to vibe code a CRM, but if you're a tech firm (or a big firm with a tech department) I think it is worth a shot, especially if you only use 50% of the features in the software you pay for.