A few months ago, I wrote about trying to get Muse to make changes to my website.
It struggled mightily.
My website was on Wix, and Muse had a hard time navigating it. It would click around, lose its place and sometimes just fail to do what I was asking.
In “The Group Chat Might Be the Future of Work”, I wrote that this was less an AI problem and more an environment problem. If we're going to work with AI agents, we need to give them places where they have enough access and control to actually do the work.
Well, I took my own advice.
Over the past few weeks, I moved Make Me Pro off Wix.
I didn't leave Wix and end up with less. I ended up with a website, a blog, a real software platform, a development pipeline, payments, authentication, AI tools and more control than I had before.
And I'm paying less for it.
It has me looking at a lot of my software subscriptions differently.
What changed
I originally used Wix because it made building and running a website easier. I could have built one without it, but why would I?
Wix gave me a visual editor, hosting, a blog, forms and a bunch of other features in one place. That convenience was worth paying for.
AI has changed the alternative.
I don't have to sit down and code every feature myself. I can describe what I want, work through the decisions with an agent, let it build, test what it created and keep iterating.
That's basically what we did with Make Me Pro.
The site and application now run on Cloudflare. The code lives in GitHub. We set up a development pipeline so changes to the code can move into production. We integrated APIs for AI, authentication and payments.
You don't need to know what most of that means.
What matters is that I now have an environment where AI agents can actually work. If I need a feature, we can build it. If the application needs to talk to another service, we can connect it. If something isn't working, the agent can get into the code and help fix it.
And Make Me Pro can do considerably more than my old Wix site ever could.
Users can create accounts, save their information, generate resumes and cover letters, prepare for interviews, work through career decisions and use a growing set of AI-powered career and leadership tools.
The comparison I'm making isn't Wix versus building everything myself anymore.
It's Wix versus what I can build with AI.
That's a much tougher comparison.
Even leaving got easier
One of the reasons we stay with software for years is because moving everything sounds terrible.
I had years of stuff tied to Wix. Blog posts, images, customer data, courses, videos, domain settings and email.
I didn't want to start over.
I didn't have to.
Astra helped us work through the migration and preserve the data I needed in the new environment.
It also helped with the messier stuff.
I had courses and videos hosted through my old setup. There wasn't an obvious one-for-one replacement waiting for them on the new site.
Astra helped me think through how to integrate that material into the new Make Me Pro offering instead of simply trying to recreate Wix somewhere else.
That was a bigger deal than I expected.
The pain of leaving a software platform used to be part of what kept you there. You had to figure out what you owned, how to get it out, where it should go and how to rebuild whatever you lost in the process.
Now I had an agent helping me do all of that.
Then there was the blog.
I wanted to move all of my old posts, but the new site didn't have a blog yet.
So we built one.
We moved the posts and images over and added the ability for me to manage the blog going forward.
I love that example because my first instinct didn't have to be, Which blogging software should I buy?
I needed a blog, so we made one.
Then I looked at the bill
My old Wix setup cost me about $473 a year between the website plan, business email and domain.
My new setup has roughly $127 a year in fixed infrastructure costs, plus the AI usage generated when people actually use the Make Me Pro tools.
That's roughly $350 less per year in fixed costs.
The savings are nice, but I'm more interested in what I'm getting for the money.
The old setup gave me a website and a collection of features.
The new one gives me the website, blog and the actual Make Me Pro software platform. I also have much more freedom to keep changing it.
Which brings me to Calendly.
I recently wanted another type of booking option. Getting what I wanted meant looking at another roughly $10 monthly subscription.
Ten dollars isn't going to break me.
But I caught myself asking a question I probably wouldn't have asked a year ago:
Why am I paying another company every month for this?
I need someone to see when I'm available, choose a time and put the meeting on my calendar.
That's a pretty simple problem.
So Calendly might be next.
We'll probably just build what I need.
This could become a problem for SaaS
For years, the math behind software subscriptions was pretty easy.
Paying $10 or $20 a month was easier than building the thing yourself.
So we paid. Then we added another subscription. And another.
AI is changing that comparison.
There's also some irony in how it's happening.
Software companies are racing to build APIs, connectors and plugins that let ChatGPT and other AI platforms work with their products.
I love these integrations. They're incredibly useful. I use them constantly.
But think about what they're doing.
They're giving agents access to the systems and information they need to do more of the underlying work themselves.
At first, the question is:
How can ChatGPT use this software for me?
Eventually, I think more people are going to ask:
Why do I need this software at all?
I don't think every software subscription disappears.
I'm not building my own payment processor because Stripe charges me money. There are plenty of places where security, reliability, scale and specialized expertise make paying someone else the obvious choice.
But there's a big category of software that charges us every month for relatively simple workflows, then asks for another $10 when we need another feature.
Those companies are going to have to give us a better reason to keep paying.
SaaS became popular because paying for software was easier than building it yourself.
AI is changing that comparison.
A few months ago, watching Muse struggle inside Wix made me think agents needed better access to the software we already use.
Now I think that's only part of it.
Sometimes I don't need the agent to get better at using the software.
I can give it a better place to work and build what I actually need.