How I Built a $10k Agent That Killed a $100k SaaS Proposal
Shipping beats planning. A scrappy project that's actually live will always beat the perfectly architected solution that is still on paper. And in professional services, the cost of “perfect later” is real. Time is your inventory, and if you're not tracking it, you're bleeding money. And we were bleeding.
Hours weren't getting logged right. Reports to clients were late. Clients were frustrated because they didn't know what was happening, and we were frustrated because we knew we were dropping the ball.
We went looking for a fix. Finance and Ops came back with the classic corporate answer: big SaaS platform, small data warehouse, $100k+ price tag and, finally, six months before we'd see any results.
A year ago? We probably would have signed that check. Things are different now.
The "Good Enough" Revolution
Two years ago, there's no way I could have built an enterprise analytics platform solo. But with coding agents, Claude Code specifically, I didn't need a team of ten. I just needed to understand the problem.
Eight weeks later, I had a working agent that tracked hours. That’s when the real problem became obvious. Bad data wasn’t a software problem, it was a people problem. So Version 2 became a behavior modifier.
"Bad data wasn’t a software problem, it was a people problem."
Instead of a passive spreadsheet nobody looks at, the agent acts like that one coworker who's really on top of things (but not annoying about it). It watches patterns and sends smart nudges. Log your time? "Nice work." Forget? Gentle reminder. Dead simple, but it completely changed how people felt about time entry.
The Numbers
Results weren't eventual. They were immediate.
Time entry compliance went from inconsistent to near-complete. Clients got real-time visibility into their projects. The "where are we on hours?" emails stopped – and so did the nagging.
Let's talk ROI, because this is where the "build vs. buy" debate ends:
Total Cost: $10k (vs. $100k+ for the SaaS tool)
Total Time: 12 weeks
Payback Period: 4 weeks
ROI: 400%
What I Learned
One person can move like a team now.
Coding agents changed the game. I shipped faster than internal teams because I didn't wait for permission or process.
Stated problems are usually symptoms.
The request was "better reports." The real problem was nobody was logging hours. Take the brief at face value and you'll build the wrong thing faster.
Structure beats vibes at scale.
Vibe coding is great for prototypes. Anything bigger needs a framework. We used BMAD to stay organized.
Simple wins.
We didn't need a data warehouse. We needed a nudge. Over-engineering kills execution.
Code is disposable now.
Feature doesn't work? Delete it. Rewrite the module in a day. "Good enough" ships, and you can iterate forever.
If you're sitting on a six-figure proposal wondering if there's another way, there probably is now.