How David is Getting Rid of SaaS Subscriptions with his own Solution (and how you can too)
👀 Read about how you can be the first to access his open source SaaS replacement
Hello 👋
I’m so excited this week to announce that No-Code Exits is shifting to focus on partnering with experts to bring you hands on training to get you started with AI & No-Code.
There is no better way to start than by doing and we exist for the founders, the doers, the go-getters, and action takers.
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Are you a No-Code maker, developer, startup founder, content creator, or social media influencer?
We want to partner with you to grow together and reach more founders 🤝
It's pretty simple tell us what your super power is and how you think we could work together.
Now on with the show!
Read about:
🔥 From a non-coder to a no-code and AI expert: launching a software company at 21 to co-founding a no-code and AI school with over 10,000 students, and now focusing on self-hosting solutions to address SaaS costs.
🛠️ Developed alfredOS: Transitioned from relying on expensive SaaS subscriptions like Google Workspace, Calendly, and Slack.
🙅♂️ Got rid of the "No-Code Tax": Identified the problem of high SaaS costs—up to $1,000–$1,500 per month—for small businesses and solo founders.
🗣️ Runs The Lumberjack: a Substack with about 7,000 followers, and how he generated $2,367 in sales within a week with one email and a pre-order discount.
Enjoy and happy building!
Spotlight ✨
🙅♂️ Get Rid of your SaaS Subscriptions
Stop paying the No-Code Tax to SaaS companies. Use a self hosted solopreneur operating system with preinstalled open source apps and AI agents and save $1k+ per month.
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🔥 No-Code Founder Interview
Learn every week from a real world no-code success story
👉 Share your own No-Code Success Story to be featured
Hello! What's your background?
I never learned how to code. I gave it a shot when we wanted to build my own video game at 11 but decided itʼs too much work and dropped it.
I always felt creative people shouldn’t have to learn ones and zeros.
This didn’t stop me from launching my own software company when I was 21 which ended up managing FB spend of major media publications using machine learning before going bankrupt in 2017.
For over a decade I learned the ins and outs of how software worked, but I never learned how to code myself. No-code tools were my playground.
Ever since I touched IFTTT for the first time in 2014 I was fascinated by the endless possibilities.
I became a builder.
What went into building your initial product?
When ChatGPT came out I immediately jumped on the idea of combining no-code and AI and I started teaching thousands of people how to do it.
I co-founded a school called Promptmaster that had over 10,000 students from 47 countries.
Leading the company meant I wasnʼt building anymore. I was managing.
Hereʼs one of the recurring problems I was facing: A two-people company having to deal with everything ourselves, bootstrapped, low on cash.
We automated everything we could but really quickly I realized that the upkeep of our monthly tech stack was growing faster than our revenues.
I started looking for answers and realized that this is the case for most small businesses. You start out and even before you even talk to a prospective customer, youʼre already paying a few hundred bucks to software providers.
How I got rid of my SaaS subscriptions
Google Workspace, Hosting, Calendly, Loom, Slack and so on.
You can cut costs here and there, but it eats your wallet for breakfast.
Adding up together you can easily end up paying $1,000 - $1,500 per month for software
And that didn’t feel right.
There was another problem, which was creating content.
We never had enough time to create content, manage the company and fulfill to clients all at the same time, so something was always on fire.
After I realized I wasn’t building anymore, I left in August 2024 and thatʼs when I started looking into this problem a lot more.
The No-Code Tax = $1,000 per month
I’ve taught about 10,000 people on how to use no-code tools.
And about 7,000 people follow my work on my blog, The Lumberjack. I get into the same issue all the time.
People who build with no-code are usually technical, but not that technical.
Most no-coders have a half-finished Python course somewhere in their email inbox.
You start learning these tools because you want to build stuff for yourself.
You want to stop paying for software that you could build.
Then it turns out itʼs not easy to build it at all, but youʼre way too deep into it and thereʼs no turning back.
So youʼre either paying with your money for SaaS subscriptions or with your time trying to build stuff.
Only because youʼre not that technical.
Why? Because if you were that technical, you could easily self-host open source alternatives for free. But while self-hosting some apps is easy, for some itʼs a rabbit hole you never wanna enter.
The whole point of using no-code tools to build internal stuff or even client stuff is to save resources. Itʼs more convenient to use no-code tools than to hire a developer.
So I found a problem to solve:
💡 SaaS costs eat up small businesses faster than they can grow.
I had to get rid of SaaS subscriptions for Solo founders.
I wrote an article about self-hosting n8n on Digital Ocean on my blog in January. It became one of my most popular posts but I got tons of confused emails asking for help.
This told me about how self-hosting saves you money but costs your time.
So I started putting together a list of the SaaS tools Iʼve been using in my businesses for the last few years: Slack, Miro, Airtable, n8n, ChatGPT, Loom, Zoom, Calendly, bitly and so on. Not to mention hiring a VA who can manage all these and make sure everything works.
It adds up and all of a sudden youʼre paying $500 - $1,000 per month on all sorts of
SaaS subscriptions.
Thatʼs the No-Code Tax.
Solo founders should self-host.
Self-hosting isnʼt easy. In some cases you can just deploy with one click from Railway, in other cases you need to run bash scripts on your Digital Ocean console. If youʼre not a software engineer, treading the shallow waters of DevOps feels like an Introduction to Linear Algebra seminar at uni.
So I asked myself a question I ask every time I build a new product (I built and shipped over 30 products during my career) and I ask this question every single time:
“What would the iPod experience of solving this look like?ˮ
This is how alfredOS was born. A self-hosted, self-managing operating system
It contains a pre-built library of the open source alternative of every single SaaS app you might need to run a bootstrapped solopreneur business.
You deploy it with a single click and it will take care of the rest for you.
Then you just log into your own alfred OS site on your own server and the only thing youʼll ever need to pay again for is your monthly server costs and for a solopreneur business that probably wonʼt go above $30 per month…like ever.
So I put together a simple landing page and sent this to my readers.
I told them: “Hey Iʼm building this. If you want to help me funding the initial build, I opened pre-order at half price.ˮ
I made $2,367 in a week selling alfred OS after sending out only one email.
I sent my notes to a DevOps guy on Upwork and we got to work. The first version is coming soon.
No-Code Exit readers can pre-order alfredOS today at a discount.
Make sure you take action today, the price is going up soon.
SaaS costs are an endless cycle.
You spend more and more money on subscriptions so you have more time to grow your business.
But then you run out of cash so you need to spend less and do more things yourself.
But then you donʼt have enough time so you start buying back your time.
This is the Triangle of Death for every single solo founder out there. How I got rid of my SaaS subscriptions?
So am I saying you shouldn’t pay for any SaaS?
Not exactly, think of software as a depreciating asset. Paying a SaaS subscription is like leasing a car.
If youʼre an Uber driver, it makes sense to lease a car because your car is your business. When the car runs, it makes money. So all costs associated with running the car is offset by the revenue you can generate with it.
But leasing a car as an individual means that youʼll keep paying a premium on an asset that keeps losing value. Itʼs a depreciating asset. SaaS has this distinction too.
If youʼre bootstrapping a no-code business, everything thatʼs about building solutions that you can monetize is an appreciating investment.
But everything thatʼs about managing the day to day operations of your business is dead weight.
So save the $1,000 per month on SaaS subscriptions and spend them on getting better tools, hiring help to build your next app or spending it on ads.
Instead, use something like alfredOS. I donʼt have a screenshot yet, but itʼs heavily influenced by Umbrel OS, which is a home server dashboard.
Iʼm building a lot of tools for no-code solo founders, but alfred OS is definitely at the top of the list on what can make running a solo business more economical.
Iʼm still running the preorder for a short while until v1 comes out in March, and you can grab a copy here 👉
Thanks for sharing your story David!
Follow David and subscribe to his Substack below to find out how you can get alfredOS for free by referring friends.
🤝 Want to Partner with No-Code Exits?
Are you a No-Code maker, developer, startup founder, content creator, or social media influencer?
We want to partner with you to grow together and reach more founders 🤝
It's pretty simple tell us what your super power is and how you think we could work together.
This is going to be a huge trend for many businesses with even just a little technical know how. Hyper-customized SaaS with a small upfront investment rather than ever-growing monthly recurring costs.
I built https://podhostapp.com/ for this very reason. (Just for hosting my own podcast)
I wonder something about AlfredOs. As it is a self hosted app, does the app run while the computer is off?