NY School Replaces Three SaaS Tools with AI, Claims $20k Savings

Commercial Software: AI Already Replaces Three SaaS Subscriptions

An IT manager at a private school in New York was paying for three software subscriptions. He has cancelled them. His estimated savings: $20,000 per year. In their place, he built a complete ERP system — billing, clients, suppliers, recurring invoices, accounting, multi-warehouse, stock control, and tax profiles for Spain and the United States — generated using ChatGPT and Codex within Visual Studio Code. It is used by 350 people every day. The question plaguing the commercial software sector remains unanswered: why pay for something an AI can build in-house?

What Was Built and Why Skeptics Doubt It

The declared scope goes beyond a simple invoicing app. Besides the ERP, the center describes a network monitoring system that inventories equipment and tracks student usage, a campus access permission manager based on schedules, and a sort of operating system for an ESP8266 microcontroller: more than 60 UNIX-style commands, cron jobs, a systemd clone, a web server with console, and a programming language inspired by C. All of this, he insists, was written by AI in just a few months while handling other tasks.

The harshest criticism came from an undeniable expert. A veteran with 28 years of SAP experience dismissed the core claim: that is not an ERP, nor anything resembling one. This peine the rift running through the entire issue. There are ERPs for companies with 100,000 employees and management tools for businesses with 350. The word is the same. His thesis is that small businesses have been paying enterprise-level prices for management software for years, and that this, rather than the code itself, is what is changing.

An Operating System Inside a 4 MB Chip?

The most controversial part of the project is the microcontroller. One technical commenter asked where the kernel was, how everything fit into an ESP8266, and whether the 60 utilities were hand-written. The response clarifies things: the kernel is provided by Arduino's own firmware; UNIX behavior is emulated on top of it, and the tools live compressed in the file system on a 4 MB board. The correction is accepted: there is no kernel/userland separation or real processes. The code has been promised as open source.

The SME Niche That Never Needed SAP

In Spain, he points out, there are millions of SMEs and freelancers who have never used SAP and never will. They needed invoicing, up-to-date accounting with the Tax Agency (Agencia Tributaria), and little else. This niche was fed for years by products like Facturaplus and its successors. The starting argument is simple: according to his account, in twenty years of supporting schools, every single client eventually requested a small adapted ERP, and none wanted to pay astronomical license fees.

The opposing side does not buy this thesis. The premise, summarized by one critic, is to pay and forget: focus on business, not code. For a company, adding, spending $50, $100, or even $200 a month on something so critical is cheap, and the expensive part is not programming it but maintaining it. Something that works is not the same as something well-built, he insists. Especially when dealing with tax matters and facing audits.

Zendesk Loses a Client, Odoo Community Another

These examples are not hypothetical. One company recently replaced Zendesk — a customer management platform with 7,000 employees — with an internally built AI application. Another describes modifying Odoo Community field by field via prompts, testing on a database clone, and leaving the partner managing that installation without a client. On a more technical level, massive migrations are cited: Stripe reportedly moved 50 million lines of Ruby code with AI assistance.

The classic counterargument — if it’s free, who makes money? — meets an uncomfortable fact. Red Hat bills millions selling software whose code is open and free. The value was never in the file: it was in standardization, support, and domain expertise. Like McDonald's: anyone can make a burger, but no one replicates the cold chain or global logistics. Those holding this view add that language models fail more often than fairground rifles once they leave the beaten path.

How Long Can the Subscription Model Hold?

The underlying debate is not technological, but about market structure. If the marginal cost of generating code tends to zero, the price of specific functionality collapses, along with the raison d'être of half the enterprise software industry. Moderates concede that these solutions work for small businesses and that no large corporation would gamble its accounting on a model’s roulette. Aggressors respond that this “no one” is already replacing tools.

Here lies the most uncomfortable aspect. The manager works with minors under US educational legislation, coordinated with the New York State Department of Education. Student names cannot pass through ChatGPT. That data is still entered manually. AI has lowered the cost of the part that was never the bottleneck — writing code — and has not touched the part that truly scares: legal, tax, and liability compliance.

With development costs plummeting and 350 satisfied users, supplier replacement should be a stampede. So far, it remains the exception told aloud. How many companies are doing the same and staying silent?