Apr 10, 2026

Should You Build Your Own Software? 🛠️

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Should You Build Your Own Software? 🛠️

Discover why building your own custom software can be a smart alternative to expensive subscriptions. This video explores the benefits of custom development and walks through a real-world example of replacing a costly support tool with a custom-built solution.

Should You Build Your Own Software? 🛠️

Discover why building your own custom software can be a smart alternative to expensive subscriptions. This video explores the benefits of custom development and walks through a real-world example of replacing a costly support tool with a custom-built solution.

Chapters

00:00

Introduction

Introduction to the topic of building custom software versus using SaaS subscriptions.

00:15

Benefits of Custom Software

00:34

Case Study: Support System

01:00

Tech Stack Overview

Transcript

00:00

Hey there.

00:00

Welcome to this week's edition of the newsletter.

00:02

It's going to be all about when does it make sense to build your own version of, software that you subscribe to?

00:10

some people say it's not a great idea and you can spend a long, long time doing it.

00:14

But I think there's actually a ton of reasons why it can make sense.

00:17

And, it can be a really good way to just get started with learning how to build stuff, try, try out a new tech stack or even build completely custom features that you would just never get in software that came off the shelf.

00:30

Obviously it can also save you a fortune.

00:33

So I'm going to go through an example, today of a, support system that I built to replace basically Intercom or Krisp that I was using before.

00:43

So it was costing $10050 a month to operate.

00:47

and I was like, I would really like to have a go at making my own version of this that's completely integrated into my app.

00:56

it's cheaper to run and easy to update.

00:59

so I'm going to go through, the stack I So I've got it open in Claude code here, inside cursor.

01:07

and I thought I would just quickly just talk through the UI for it basically to look at it first.

01:14

It's very similar to any other support system that you've seen.

01:18

and once I've kind of showed you a bit of it then I'll go into a bit more about the stack and why I think this is such a great stack to use use.

01:25

so it's cost efficient and really AI friendly.

01:29

So you can see you've got your list of conversations on the left here.

01:32

So these are from a chat widget that's installed on, on the live site.

01:37

and you can go into chats and you can obviously see you've got all the, the information about the viewer, what pages they visited.

01:45

I've also done an integration so it pulls in their billing and account information from my app's backend which was really nice.

01:52

you've got live visitor view, so visitors who are on the site right now you can see that you've also got a list of all the contacts.

02:00

it's also got a completely built in help desk.

02:04

So I imported all of my previous help desk into this and and it creates these really good looking support articles and I'll show you how they work in a second.

02:15

it's also got an app update section so when you make changes to the app I put them in here.

02:21

Now that was something I used to have to do manually before so that's been really nice.

02:24

And it's got some basic analytics, widget ability, to customize the design of the widget and integrations like email.

02:33

So it can handle incoming email, it always routed via postmark and then it ends up in the chat inbox here.

02:42

it's also fully integrated with Slack so any new customer messages that come in go through into Slack and I can reply directly from Slack which is great.

02:50

when you're on the go.

02:53

so that's just a very quick look of what the back end looks like.

02:56

I'll quickly show you what the front end of the app looks like to a user.

03:03

It's this little chat bubble down here in the right and you can see you've got your support where you can start a chat.

03:09

Pretty standard.

03:11

you've got the docs so you can read all the help docs in there which is really nice.

03:15

And you've got the product updates so you can go in there and watch the, the videos from me about like what's new in the product and all of that.

03:23

And it, and it also tracks, what articles are new.

03:27

So you can see here I made this little widget that just pops open, the updates to tab and shows you the latest ones.

03:35

So it's really, it's really, really nice.

03:36

It's been a fantastic drop in direct replacement for my, previous system that I was paying for.

03:43

but yeah, I thought I would talk you through a little bit about the app stack behind it, that's powering it all.

03:51

So with this project I really wanted to try out Convex the database, as an alternative to Supabase, because I'd heard it was really AI friendly, and it worked really, really well, with, with CLAUDE code.

04:06

so that was my prime motivation for trying this.

04:08

I also wanted to try running a full stack app, built with Next JS on Cloudflare workers, instead of Vercel, which is what I would usually use.

04:19

So I kind of wanted to try out both of those things and that's why I ended up building this kind of over a weekend as much as anything, just to teach myself those tools.

04:29

and I did it all through here in CLAUDE code.

04:32

so I had the Convex, CLI installed and the Cloudflare mcp and then I worked through a plan of what I wanted, the software to do.

04:44

I explained everything, you know, which product I was trying to copy, what new features I wanted, and that I wanted to use Convex and deploy on Cloudflare.

04:56

And within an hour or two, I had it all pretty much ready to go.

05:00

so yeah, Clawco put the whole thing together, gave me the widget code that I needed to embed on my site.

05:08

all of the help desk set up Convex database with both a development and a production version and deployed all of it.

05:16

so it really was pretty straightforward.

05:18

And the really great thing about it is the costs to run it is basically zero.

05:24

I'm on the free plan on Convex and also on a free Cloudflare worker for this one.

05:31

And it's just worked amazingly.

05:33

It's done such a good job and reduced the amount I'm spending every month and hasn't really taken up too much time learn.

05:41

And as I said I thought it was a great opportunity to learn a new stack.

05:46

So that is my current kind of favorite developer stack at the moment is Claude code convex for the database and Cloudflare for the actual app hosting.

05:56

So I hope you found this useful.

05:58

I'd love to hear what products that you'd consider building yourself.

06:02

are there any really expensive subscriptions or things that you use that you're like, I'd like to get rid of that and build my own version.

06:10

I'd love to hear from you.

06:11

Drop me a reply below.

06:12

But yeah, hopefully that gives you some inspiration to get started on your own little weekend build project.

06:18

That's it.

06:19

Thank you, Bye.

Should You Build Your Own Software? 🛠️ — Tella