Should You Vibe Code Your Customer Success Software?

“I replaced my CRM after a weekend of chatting with Claude.”

How many times have you seen that on LinkedIn lately? While posts like those usually come from people trying to sell you a course on how to use AI, they fuel the “SaaSpocalypse” that has the B2B world wondering, “Why the heck do we spend so much on software every month?”

If you can vibe code anything, is it time to swap your subscriptions for tokens? You could, but that doesn’t mean you should –  at least not in every case. Read on to find out what is and isn’t worth vibe coding.

What is Vibe Coding?

The term “vibe coding” originated with AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who shared how to use AI to build software through prompts rather than coding it yourself. 

Is it as simple as opening ChatGPT and typing “build me software”? Not quite. Vibe coding usually means using one of the following:

• No-code tools: No-code tools like Zapier and Lovable allow you to prompt your way to working software. These may not be production-ready tools, but they’re good for simple use cases.
• Claude Code/ChatGPT Codex: Claude Code and ChatGPT Codex are dedicated AI coding tools from the companies Anthropic and OpenAI. While these are more technical than no-code tools, you actually don’t have to be a professional programmer to use them.
• AI code tools: Dedicated AI coding tools like Cursor and GitHub Copilot are immensely popular with engineering teams who use them as assistants and debuggers.

You can vibe code a simple to-do list, calculator, or dashboard in as little as a few hours. But can you vibe code an entire Customer Success Platform? That’s where things get tricky.

The Case For Vibe Coding

There is a case for vibe coding your own software; we’ll grant you that. Before we jump to telling you why vibe coding enterprise software isn’t a great idea, here are the reasons you may want to charge ahead with it anyway:

• You’ll own your own data: When you buy a CRM, you’re paying for access to your own data. It’s a bit silly, isn’t it? Your customer data, email history, and custom properties are yours, and by vibe coding you can guarantee that you own your data and the platform that houses it. Of course, then you need to protect it and host it, too.
• You’ll avoid per-seat pricing: Per-seat pricing penalizes growth. The more your CS team expands, the more you will need to pay to give CSMs and managers access to a platform. By building your own software, it can scale infinitely. Of course, the token costs to develop and maintain the platform will become eye-watering as token usage rises.
• You’ll build software that maps to your exact workflows: Why buy software that forces you to conform to its rigid workflows when you can build something from scratch that maps to how you think and work? Of course, when your workflows change – and they will change – you’ll need to rebuild the platform to map to them.

Vibe coding gives you complete control over your data and workflows, but that control comes at a cost. You may avoid the $30K annual fee for enterprise software, but that cost will be reallocated as more work for your team.

The Hidden Costs of Building Software From Scratch

There’s no denying that AI has transformed software development. 91% of engineering teams use AI coding assistants (granted, only 33% see productivity gains), and it’s estimated that AI saves engineers nearly four hours per week. 

But it’s far from perfect. 

Moving fast leads to bottlenecks around reviews and exponentially increasing tech debt. Beyond that, though, several hidden costs come with developing your own software rather than purchasing a subscription:

• Security: A study by Georgia Tech across 43,000 security advisories revealed that AI-generated code could put you at risk of several common vulnerabilities. With millions of developers using the same models, bugs are repeated often in AI-generated code bases, making you an easy target for hackers.
• Hosting: Software doesn’t run by magic; you need to manage hosting yourself when creating your own software. That means being responsible for downtime, maintaining access across your team, and paying to host the applications.
• Maintenance: Bugs, glitches, and crashes are all your problem when you build your own software. That means either your CS team will have to wait for weeks on end for engineering to make changes, or engineers will need to work on internal tools instead of customer-facing products – neither is a good option.
• Feature development: While vibe coding lets you dream it, then build it, the burden falls on you to come up with new features and build them in a way that is compatible with your existing software platform.

It’s not that vibe coding is a bad thing to do. It’s that building enterprise software is incredibly time-consuming, even if ChatGPT handles most of the coding for you. 

Rather than build a platform from scratch, it’s far better to build on top of an existing platform. 

Many software platforms offer an MCP server (Model Context Protocol) that lets you access platform data and build your own functionality using AI. It’s the best of both worlds: The underlying data and infrastructure are secured by the platform, but you get to customize your experience with AI.

Not every Customer Success Platform offers an MCP, but Vitally does. And with Vitally’s native AI features like meeting recording and analysis, summary generation, and an AI Copilot, there’s a ton more power at your fingertips than what you could vibe code on your own.

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The Math Behind Building vs. Buying a Customer Success Platform

There’s a real ROI conversation worth having here, so we developed a calculator to help you decide whether building or buying is more cost-effective for your company.

Let’s start with a few broad assumptions:

• 15 CSMs
• 100 customers per CSM
• 20% account growth year over year

There are three ways to go about building a CSP:

• Chat with an LLM: No fancy software needed, just have your CSMs chat with an LLM for help generating summaries or running reports.
• Schedule workflows: An LLM can handle daily workflows and schedule automations on a daily or weekly basis. With agents that can pull records from your CRM and customer tooling, this is a major step above simply asking ChatGPT for help.
• Fully agentic with automation: For the most serious and AI-driven CS teams, this is where you lean on LLMs to fully automate workflows, pull data from 6+ sources, and develop health scores at scale.

Beyond these three options, there’s a divide between:

1. Agents and workflows to run processes on a set schedule while you interface with the LLM.
2. Building your own fully-featured Customer Success Platform, complete with workspaces, playbooks, reporting dashboards, and all the bells and whistles you can imagine.

While you can prompt your way to some perfectly serviceable tools and workflows, advanced tooling will require the help of a developer, so let’s run the cost calculation with a few assumptions:

• A developer’s hourly rate is $150/hour
• Building agents and workflows will take 30 days, and building and managing a full platform will require three full-time developers over 12 months
• And 20% of the total build cost will be budgeted for maintenance and improvements each following year.
• You’re going to build with Sonnet, and the monthly API spend per CSM will be $75/month

Alright, what is this going to cost?

If you go the agentic/workflow route, you’re looking at $77,000 to build in your first year, and $258,000 over the first three years. If you build an entire Customer Success Platform, it’ll be an eye-watering $1,100,000 in your first year to build and $1,600,000 over three years to maintain. 

Meanwhile, you could save up to 55% of the cost and go live in just 4-6 weeks with a dedicated CS platform. If you’re having trouble getting buy-in to invest in Customer Success software, then numbers like these can be enough to convince even the most skeptical executives.

Try out the “Build vs Buy Calculator” here to see what the results are for your company.

Build vs Buy: Which is the Right Choice?

So, should you build or buy? 

Both routes require investment on your part; it’s a matter of whether you’d want to invest dollars to buy software or time to build it. And the answer is rarely black-and-white. We’ve used AI to build internal tools, but we have plenty of SaaS subscriptions too for functions that are mission-critical to our business.

We recommend that you consider vibe coding your own software if…

• Your use case is simple or narrow
• You don’t plan to integrate more than one tool into what you build
• You do not need to set up role-based access
• You’re building on top of an existing platform’s MCP

We recommend that you consider buying rather than building software if…

• Security is at all a concern
• The product you need to build is complex
• You expect to have many users for this, and need role-based access
• You plan to integrate several tools, some of which contain sensitive data
• You have limited time for feature development and maintenance

For example, a support dashboard showing the number of open tickets and a leaderboard from your team is a great example of something to vibe code. But what if you need a Customer Success Platform that integrates with your CRM, Stripe data, product data, and support ticket data to do the following:

• Generate configurable health scores based on factors and weights you define
• Display data in customizable dashboards to give you an overview of accounts
• Send real-time alerts based on customer activity
• Record, transcribe, and analyze customer calls 
• Interact with all the above data through an MCP

For that, you’d need a Customer Success Platform (CSP) like Vitally. Vitally gives you full visibility across your accounts, one centralized home for your data, and AI-powered tools to scale your CS team. A CSP requires budget approval, though, which is where our build vs. buy calculator can help.

Need Numbers That Will Impress Your CFO? Try Out Our Build vs. Buy Calculator

It’s one thing to say that you’ll leave vibe coding to the simple use cases. It’s another to prove that the ROI behind buying more complex software makes sense.

For that, you’re going to need budget and approval, which means getting buy-in from finance. They’re going to want firm numbers, not simple projections with lots of handwaving. 

We’ve got you covered. We created a calculator that lets you enter your team size, revenue growth, and specific needs, so you can see exactly what it would cost to build a Customer Success Platform and how that cost compares to buying a leading one like Vitally.

Click the button below to try the calculator and settle the debate for your company.

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