I was spending $1,069 a month on software. CRM, email automation, phone system, scheduling, lead scoring, content management, and analytics. Seven different platforms. Seven different logins. Seven different bills.
Now I spend $140. Here is how.
The Problem
When you run multiple businesses, every SaaS vendor wants to charge you per seat, per business, per feature. A $29/month tool becomes $174 when you need it across 6 brands. Multiply that across 7 categories and you are bleeding cash before you make a dollar.
The Solution: One Database, Edge Functions for Everything
Supabase gives you a Postgres database, auth, storage, edge functions, and cron jobs. All on one bill. I built everything I needed as edge functions that share the same database.
What I Replaced
CRM — Was using HubSpot free tier across 6 brands. Hit limits fast. Replaced with a leads table, a lead_interactions table, and a scoring function that runs on insert.
Email Automation — Mailchimp wanted $60/month for 6 audiences. Replaced with a Resend integration inside an edge function. Sequences stored in the database. pg_cron triggers the sends.
Phone System — VAPI was $0.15/minute. Built Load Bearing Voice with Asterisk, Whisper STT, Claude, and OpenAI TTS. Self-hosted. Per-minute cost dropped to under $0.03.
Scheduling — Calendly wanted $12/seat. Built a booking edge function that checks availability against a schedules table and sends confirmation via Resend.
Lead Scoring — Was using a Zapier workflow that cost $49/month. Replaced with a Postgres trigger that scores leads on insert based on property value, county, and distress signals.
Content Management — Was manually posting everywhere. Built build_content_queue table with auto-draft-content and publish-build-content edge functions. Drafts with Claude Haiku, publishes to dev.to automatically.
Analytics — Replaced Google Analytics with a simple page_views table and a lightweight script. No cookie banners needed.
The Numbers
Before: $1,069/month ($12,828/year)
After: $140/month ($1,680/year)
Annual savings: $11,148
That is not optimization. That is elimination.
When This Makes Sense
This approach works if you are technical enough to write SQL and deploy edge functions. If you are not, the SaaS tools are worth it. But if you can build, you should build. Every subscription is someone else profiting from your workflow.
Own your infrastructure. Own your margins.
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