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$600,000 Salesforce contract, cancelled
Replacing Salesforce
Curative, a health insurer that grew out of a Covid testing company, vibe coded the replacement in house. The company's agents run inside it, and it fits the workflow better than Salesforce did. Curative had employed a full-time Salesforce administrator, and other industry software took multiple full-time people to maintain. One great engineer can take over that work and build any custom feature whenever it's wanted.
Maintenance is one of the hardest parts of building in house. Even so, for most businesses of any reasonable scale it probably pays off. Curative is cutting about 80% of its SaaS spend this year, and an internal slide tracks when each contract comes due and who tells the vendor it won't be renewed.
Claims and dashboards
The insurance claims system was an off-the-shelf platform that Curative migrated to a few years ago. It was hard to use, its API barely worked, and getting data out of its database was hard. Curative built its own claims system from scratch, has moved most of the workflows over, and will be fully off the old platform in July.
Google's Looker was expensive, so Curative moved its dashboards to Snowflake. An agentic workflow found each dashboard, worked out how to convert it, shut it down on the Looker side, and booted it up on the other. One or two people finished it in a couple of months, a job that would probably have taken a year and a whole bunch of engineers and data scientists.
Why does building software in house suddenly work?
The term vibe coding was coined by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy in early 2025 for describing software to an AI model and letting it write the code. Models can now produce working application code from plain-language instructions, which cuts the engineering time for internal tools. Custom software that once needed a team can sometimes be built and changed by one or two engineers. That shifts the comparison between buying a vendor product and building a tailored one.
Why does maintaining software cost so much?
Software needs continuing work after it ships: security patches, dependency updates, bug fixes, and changes when connected systems change their interfaces. Researchers and practitioners have long estimated that maintenance makes up a large share of a program's lifetime cost. Frederick Brooks wrote about this in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. Vendors spread that work across thousands of customers, which is the main economic argument for buying instead of building.
How do Snowflake and Looker differ?
Snowflake is a cloud data warehouse that stores data and runs queries on it. Looker is a business intelligence tool that sits on top of such a warehouse and turns query results into dashboards. Google bought Looker in 2019 for $2.6 billion. Because dashboards are defined by queries and layouts, moving them between tools means translating each definition one by one.
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