Vibe coding your own tool is the future.

Marketing SaaS never sold you software. It sold you the fact that building the software yourself was expensive. That “fact” might’ve been true before late 2022, before ChatGPT put a competent coding assistant in everyone’s pocket.

Since then, coding has been a walk in the park, like talking to a friend.

The choice in the past was between hiring a team of engineers, developers, and UI/UX consultants to build a tool, or paying a SaaS company for one. That trade-off no longer exists, and most of the industry is still pricing as if it does.

Vibe coding has deleted the cost of entry.

What was marketing SaaS actually selling?

Engineering cost, mainly. The product itself was rarely the hard part. Ask what a mid-tier SaaS tool actually does and you can usually say it in one sentence: it stores some rows, shows them in a table, and sends an email when a row changes. What you were paying for was never having to build that yourself.

Most SEO and AEO tools are “thin wrappers.” They take a public API (Google Search Console, Ahrefs, OpenAI), format the data into a table, and charge you $99 a month for the privilege.

If you can describe a tool’s function in two sentences, it is likely a “thin” tool. For example:

• AI content generators: a prompt wrapper around some cheap AI model.
• Keyword gap tools: a script that compares two lists of keywords.
• AEO auditing tools: they run direct API calls, which can never reflect a real user’s query. AI models like Claude and Gemini remember a user’s history and respond accordingly, and no third-party tool can replicate that.

In other words, if a tool only provides a UI for an existing API, it has no moat. You are paying for not dealing with the hassle of building your own tool.

Which SEO and AEO SaaS categories are already dead and don’t know it?

The thin ones. In the growth world, “thin” means the tool is just a UI bolted onto a public API or a basic scraping script. If the core value is just cleaning up the data, it’s a weekend build.

SaaS category	What it actually is under the hood	Weekend build?
AI content “optimizers”	A system prompt that says “include these keywords,” plus some Chinese LLM.	Yes, in an afternoon
Keyword gap tools	A script that compares two CSVs and finds the difference	Yes
Basic rank trackers	A headless browser hitting a SERP and searching for a string	Yes
AEO “visibility” dashboards	A script that pings an LLM API and checks for brand mentions	Yes
Internal link auditors	A recursive crawler that maps <a> tags to a database	Yes
SERP snapshot tools	An API call to ZenSerp or ValueSerp with a “save as PDF” button	Yes

None of these tools have a technical moat. They have a subscription page and a habit. The habit is the only thing still working.

A two-question moat test

Run any tool you pay for through this before you renew:

1. Is the hard part the software -> your data, your team’s habits, compliance, other people’s accounts?
2. If you lost access tomorrow, could an AI coding agent rebuild the core function of it in a weekend?

Yes to both means the moat will soon be gone.

It’s not all doom and gloom yet. AI coding helps developers ship fast and really pursue their imagination, as long as they have some funding. And all the big ** are well-funded right now in the AI bubble. And all the little ** are building open-source and free tools like always.

What about vibe coding SEO and AEO tools?

Traditional SEO tools are built around indices: links and keywords. AEO requires tools built around entities: relationships and facts.

Because the AEO landscape is changing weekly, waiting for a SaaS company to update its “AEO dashboard” is a losing strategy. By the time the feature ships, the algorithm has shifted.

Instead of waiting for a tool, you can build “disposable” growth scripts:

• Need: “I need to know how Gemini perceives my brand’s pricing versus a competitor’s.”
• Vibe: Describe the prompt and the reporting logic to an AI chatbot.
• Result: A custom Python script that gives you a raw, unbiased answer in 20 minutes.

Where marketing SaaS is still useful

I don’t vibe-code everything. SaaS is still the right choice for:

• Massive data sets: I’m not rebuilding the entire Ahrefs index in my basement.
• Complex infrastructure: high-availability databases that can’t afford a second of downtime.
• Compliance: when the legal risk of owning the data outweighs the cost of the subscription.

Build unless the SaaS provides data you cannot possibly get elsewhere.

If you’re still paying for “thin” SEO tools, I suggest trying to build your own. Give it a shot, what have you got to lose, except some API credits.