“The point of people doing this is not to save money. No one who's leaving our product is doing it to save money. Our product is effectively free to begin with. They do it purely for customization. Every cancellation notice is saying, I wanted it to work exactly this way. Yours was previously the closest I could get to that. But with AI, I can make it work exactly the way I want it to.”
Startup to Last · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · November 2026
Context
Tyler King runs a small-business CRM. He explains why customers leave to build their own tools with AI: not price, but the ability to make software work exactly the way they want.
Transcript
…The other big point of disagreement is that Ian believes businesses will generally act rationally with my few exceptions. And Aaron is like, people often act emotionally and not, even if it doesn't make financial sense to spend all the time and host your own infrastructure and own the security.
It's a lot of fear-based behavior that's going to go into this. Absolutely.
And then my final thing I want to say, this is me making a statement to Aaron in case as ammunition. The point of people doing this is not to save money. No one who's leaving our product is doing it to save money. Our product is effectively free to begin with. They do it purely for customization. Like every cancellation notice is saying, I wanted it to work exactly this way. Yours was previously the closest I could get to that. But with AI, I can make it work exactly the way I want it to. But
this is where I go, like, can't you make Less Annoying CRM do that? Like with a more flexible object architect, you don't have custom objects.
Not the way Salesforce does, but this is a perfect teaser for what I'm going to talk about later. All right,
cool. Yes and no,
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