Hubspot's gross margin last year was 83.8%. Numbers are similar if not higher for other companies like Salesforce! The software costs them almost nothing to run!

It made sense when we lived in a world where you either had to buy or hire a bunch of engineers. But now it's so easy to hop on Claude code and build software; why are people still buying?

I'm building a startup now and one of my customers (a broker at cushman & wakefield) said she built her own literally in a day. It worked better too cause it was just for her exact workflow and she cancelled her Salesforce subscription a week later, saving her $125 a month.

I may be a bit bias, since I have a technical background and was an engineer at xAI earlier this year. But curious what other people's experience has been? Has anyone actually tried building stuff and then went back to just buying software?