I Built 4 CLI Tools to Avoid Paying for SaaS - Here's How Much I Saved

I Built 4 CLI Tools to Avoid Paying for SaaS — Here's How Much I Saved Last year I was paying for: JSON formatter online tool: $5/month Markdown to HTML converter: $10/month (Docusaurus setup cost) Email validation service: $29/month (Clean.io) SQL builder library: $15/month (npm packages) Total: $59/month = $708/year Then I realized: Most of these tasks are trivial to code. So I built CLI tools for all of them. Took 3 days total. Cost: $0. Now I pay $0/month . Here's my story. The Realization I was building a data processing pipeline. My workflow: Get API response (minified JSON) Copy to online formatter (slow, 2-3 seconds) Analyze manually (tedious) Export cleaned data Validate email list (use paid service) Build SQL query (write code, test, fix) Total time per workflow: 15-20 minutes "Why am I paying for this?" I thought. The Solution: Build It Myself I decided to build CLI tools for the most painful tasks. Tool 1: JSON Formatter What I paid for: Prettier, online formatter services