Salesforce’s Ultimate Moat: You Can’t Vibe Code Infrastructure

Highlights

• Curative CEO Fred Turner told Harry Stebbings of 20VC that his team replaced a $600k annual Salesforce subscription with a vibe-coded custom CRM solution in two months. 
• While this achievement is impressive, it’s not the whole story. Fred himself admits that infrastructure was challenging, and this also adds cost that wasn’t there before.
• Cancelling Salesforce doesn’t mean you’re immediately saving 100% of your subscription expenditure; it simply means you’re able to redistribute some of it to cover new costs of your self-managed solution.
• Salesforce offers far more than just an application. They handle the hosting, the security, the updates, and the system resources distribution across multiple tenants. These are things that anyone who wants to build their own system will need to consider and handle themselves. 

Recently, there’s been a lot of discussion about whether or not it’s possible to replace Salesforce with a vibe-coded solution. It’s a pointed topic, and one that Salesforce has been trying to address for a while now. They’re even doubling down on this vision by introducing Headless 360 at TDX ‘26 and various packaged solutions at Dreamforce ‘26.

In this article, I’ll be diving deep into one case study in particular, which is the Curative CEO Fred Turner’s discussion with Harry Stebbings of 20VC. Turner made the claim on the podcast that he was able to fully replace $600,000 of Salesforce subscriptions with a vibe-coded CRM solution in two months. So, what can we learn from this, and does it mean that everyone can do the same thing? 

The Technical Achievements of Fred Turner and Curative

Fred Turner is the CEO of Curative Inc., and he has accidentally become a bit of a poster child for the idea of the ‘SaaSpocalypse’. He made claims on the 20VC podcast that he was able to replace over half a million dollars of annual Salesforce subscriptions with a vibe-coded solution. 

This is what he said on the podcast when asked about whether he bought the theory that SaaS was dead: “We just recently cancelled our Salesforce contract, because we have an internal CRM that was vibe-coded that is working better, that is managing our process better, that is more integrated into what we’re doing. We run our agents inside of it, and no one was using Salesforce anymore. Six hundred thousand dollars a year, gone to zero. It took two months.”

It appears that Turner and Curative were able to pull off what many can only dream of. Gone are the days of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to the cloud giant for the privilege of using their software. Instead, his team was able to build and host their own CRM that Turner says works better for them. However, this wasn’t without its challenges.

When Harry asked him if it was worth the engineering hours to vibe-code their own CRM and maintain it, Turner responded with:

“Maintenance is definitely one of the most challenging pieces, I agree with that. I think, for most businesses of any reasonable scale, yes. It is worth it. Now, whether they’ll have the tech resources to do that soon, that’s the bigger question: When will this happen? But when you build those things custom to your workflow, they work better. Most of these big systems, you’re paying an administrator. 

“We had a full-time Salesforce administrator. You’re paying people whose sole job is to manage this archaic software platform, not that Salesforce is archaic. We had a few other internal apps that we were paying for, like industry software, that was taking multiple FTEs to maintain it. You can transition that to one great engineer. Whenever you want a custom feature, they can just go build it.”

The two then reflected on the $600K per year figure that Turner had mentioned, as it is a significant amount of money that the company was now saving: 

“We’re seeing that there’s pockets of software that persist because they’re more infrastructure based. We’re seeing a lot of backend stuff like Sentry that becomes part of your infrastructure. Slack has been notoriously hard internally for us to [replace]. 

“So many people have built integrations and workflows that are now working in Slack, but they keep putting the prices up. If they keep putting the prices up then eventually it’ll make sense to replace that… We’re cutting back 80% of our SaaS spend this year.”

There’s no denying that what Turner and his team are achieving is impressive. However, it’s important to pick up on one of the issues he’s subtly alluding to. Infrastructure and technical maintenance are a lot of hard work and require the right people and financial investment to get right. 

This is something many inspired vibe coders don’t consider: the infrastructure. The application layer is the easy part, but knowing how to host it, how to maintain it, and how to scale it properly is a whole new ball game. 

What Fred Turner Actually Cancelled

There’s something else that’s worth mentioning that you can learn from Turner’s story. He cut back on Curative’s SaaS spend by 80%, but what he hasn’t mentioned out loud is what new costs it’s incurred as a result of its new custom solution. It may sound like a 100% reduction in expenditure, but their new custom solution needs to live somewhere, and it wasn’t free to build.

Curative has had a reduction of $600K per year in Salesforce subscriptions. It has also had a salary reduction for the aforementioned full-time Salesforce Administrator. There were also a handful of other SaaS subscriptions that were cancelled that we don’t know the cost of. This is a great cost reduction and gives the company a lot of breathing room. It also leaves them with funds that they can reallocate to the new custom solution, its development, maintenance, and ongoing infrastructure costs.

Here’s what I’m trying to point out, in more familiar terms: When you build a new Screen Flow, it doesn’t cost you per flow. You aren’t paying an ongoing $100 subscription for that new flow, and you don’t need to pay per use. However, you do need to pay for Salesforce in the first place, as it acts as a “host” in this scenario. 

The same goes for Curative’s new CRM. The only cost for the build itself is the cost of the engineer that Turner mentions they had to do the build, and the cost of whatever vibe coding tools they used. The ongoing cost is where the company now needs to host their custom solution. 

Notably, Turner also said that they kept Slack and a handful of other tools that didn’t make sense to try and replace. However, their main Salesforce subscription was cancelled, along with some other SaaS subscriptions that they were paying for.

Included In Your Salesforce Subscription

Salesforce built their brand off the idea of “no software”. What this ultimately means is that you no longer need to install software on on-premises servers, and you don’t need to worry about ongoing updates and maintenance yourself. Instead, Salesforce built a cloud-based platform that allows multiple tenants (multi-tenancy) to access the same software and infrastructure resources at the same time. 

Yes, you’re buying Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Data 360, Agentforce, etc., but you’re also essentially paying for Salesforce to manage the underlying servers, databases, and other infrastructure. Critically, you no longer need to worry about any of the hardware, software maintenance, or updates yourself. 

Disappearing Act or Teleportation?

So, that $600K that was saved from Salesforce and other SaaS subscriptions – is it really a 100% savings? Was there really a magical $600k bill that disappeared entirely? Or was it less of a disappearing act and more of a teleportation feat? This is what a lot of idealist junior vibe coders don’t understand: there’s more to it than just replacing the application layer.

Curative cut out Salesforce and the Salesforce Administrator role from the equation. Instead, they require a single engineer to build and maintain their custom solution, and they are also responsible for the underlying infrastructure. Where will their database be stored? How will their users access it? How will bad actors who are not their users be stopped from accessing it? 

That one engineer just became borderline irreplaceable to Curative’s business. Unless their documentation is absolutely pristine, every new feature should go through that person, as should every bug report, every security flag, etc. 

In addition, Curative now needs to pay their own hosting fees – wherever they’re choosing to store their data won’t be free. Whether it’s Supabase, Google Firebase, AWS, or another cloud provider, this is a new cost that the company didn’t have before. 

Turner points out that their AI tooling costs have increased significantly as well: “This is one of the leading indicators for us – our Anthropic costs over the last six or seven months have 6x’d every month. What was a base of tens of thousands of dollars per month is now millions of dollars per month. Eventually, we’re going to have to stop that spending increase because it’ll get unreasonable, but we just keep finding new things to do with it.”