GoKawiilI built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for. And I will never sell it.
Every instinct trained into technical people over the past decade says that’s leaving value on the table. Landing page, Stripe, launch post, recurring revenue. That script is practically a religion in indie circles.
I think that script is now obsolete. What I’m doing instead, I call Service with a Software: private tools that never get sold, built to make one service impossible to compete with. I’d bet it’s the strongest position left for independent builders. Here’s why, starting with the tool I’ll never sell.
The instrument
I’m a designer, and I got tired of AI prototyping tools. Magic Patterns, Figma Make, all of them share the same flaw: they ignore your design system unless you invest serious effort making them merely adequate. So I went around them. I replicated our design system in Tailwind classes, wrote a Claude Code skill around it, and started generating full HTML prototypes. Interactive, on-system by default, higher fidelity than anything Figma gives me.
That created a boring second problem: sharing. Mailing an HTML file is painful. Putting a page on the open web is trivial, but enterprise work needs discretion: password protection, sandboxing, a clean link. The tools offering that put it behind a paywall, when they offer it at all. So I built my own sharing platform on my VPS. Upload, sandbox, password. A few hours.
Here’s why it will never have a pricing page. As a product, it’s nothing: a file host with a password field, cloneable in a weekend. Inside my client work, it’s something no product can be: an experience matched to one company’s design system, one company’s security constraints, one workflow. The moment I generalize it to sell it, I sand off exactly the fit that makes it valuable. The software isn’t the product. It’s an instrument that makes the service around it impossible to compare.
That’s the whole model in miniature. You may know the older cousin, Software with a Service: the SEO consultant who pays for the expensive Ahrefs seat and sells you advice bundled with access to the data. Software is the product, the human is the wrapper. Service with a Software is that model flipped. The service is the product, and private, overfit software is what makes it unrepeatable.
A cute inversion, sure. But why would this be the model now, when for twenty years the smart move was the opposite: escape the service, become the product?
The squeeze
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