The only named product was Retool.
It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro
Okay, so two hours with an LLM vs maybe 2.5 days without an LLM in the best-case scenario (i.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost) - it sounds like it was always pretty cheap to replace the SaaS, but the business didn't do it.
TBH, the arguments were never "It would take too long to do ourselves", it was always "but then we'd have to maintain it ourselves".
The place I am consulting at now just moved (i.e. a month ago) from their in-house built ticketing system ($0/m as it had not needed maintenance for over a year) to Jira (~$2k/m).
In this specific case, it was literally 0 hours to avoid paying the SaaS, and they still moved, because they wanted some modern features (billing for time on support calls, etc) and figured that rather than update their in-house system to add support hours costing (a day, at most) they may as well move to a system that already had it.
(Joke's on them though - the Jira solution for support hours costing is not near the level of granularity they need, even with multiple paid plugins).
Once again, companies aren't using SaaS because it's cheaper or quicker; they could already quickly replace their SaaS with in-house.
I'm not a frontend guy, I'm an operations guy that sometimes does some backends. So it's likely a solid 2.5 days for me to build the pair of these, probably more I haven't touched Javascript in over a decade.
Right, understood and agreed, but this was not about you and your specific skills or lack thereof; your anecdote was in support of an argument that companies would stop their SaaS because LLMs enable them to build in house.
That was your argument, right?
So in the absence of LLMs, if the company wanted to stop paying for the SaaS, would they have chosen you to do the replacement, or someone who had recent experience in the tech?
Look, we are interested in comparing the time taken to replace the SaaS with an LLM, and the time taken to replace the SaaS without LLM assistance.
That's really the only two scenarios under discussion, so lets explore those exhaustively:
1. Without LLMs: In the worst case scenario, the company had to pay for 2.5 days of employee time with the best case being 1 day of employee time. Lets go with something in-between like 1.5 days of dev time.
2. With LLMs: The company pays for 0.5 days of employee time (includes the overhead of token cost/subscription).
The difference between the only two scenarios that we have is literally a single day of employee costs!
I am skeptical that the company failed to leave the SaaS earlier because they didn't want to eat the cost of a 1.5 paid days for an employee, but a difference of a single day of cost was enough to tip the scales.