Pieter Levels Cut His Software Bill 90% With Claude

Software bills don't jump. They creep. A backup setting nobody revisits, a server from five years ago, a plan bought for a busy month that never got downgraded. Pieter Levels, the solo founder behind Photo AI, Nomad List and Remote OK, let ten years of that pile up across his sites.

Then he asked Claude Code to go through it. It found about $34,000 a month. His core business now runs on about $300 a month while serving 20,000 paying customers, and he says his total costs are down 90% from a year ago. Here is where the money went, what he built himself, and what he still pays for.

How Does a Business This Size Run on $300 a Month?

Two different things happened, and they are worth keeping apart. Both show up in our Replaced By AI research. First, over the past year he replaced a list of paid tools with small ones he built. Second, this month he had an AI assistant read through what was left and cut the waste. The first is a build decision. The second is housekeeping that almost any company could do this week.

The $300 figure leaves out Photo AI, which he treats separately because its AI models and photo storage cost far more than every other site together: about $7,000 a month in GPU time and $800 in storage. With it, the total is about $8,000 a month. All numbers here come from his Nov 3 post and an earlier thread from Sep 9.

What Did Claude Find?

Six line items, from his post:

The largest cut wasn't software at all. He had never updated the video models in Photo AI, so they stayed expensive while cheaper and better ones came out. He switched models, sent some image jobs to Google Cloud where he had credits, and routed others to a provider that sells AI models at cost. The GPU bill went from $36,000 to $7,000 a month.

The backup fix is the one most teams will recognize. His Backblaze B2 backups kept every version of every file, from every server, for over a decade. Limiting versions to 30 days took the bill from $1,200 to $26 a month (B2 charges by stored data, so old versions add up). He did the same for photo storage, moving pictures older than 90 days to a cheaper storage class.

Then the small ones. Claude went through his domain renewals and found names he no longer used. It also read his own Claude subscription and found he wasn't using the limits of the top plan, so he dropped from $200 to $100 a month. The tool cut its own bill.

What Did He Build Instead of Buying?

The Sep 9 thread is the build half of the story. He listed paid services he swapped for small tools of his own, which he describes as vibe coded. The software replacements alone add up to about $5,750 a month by his numbers:

He puts the total from that thread at about $25,000 a month. Most of the gap is people, not software: about $10,000 a month of human moderation he moved to an AI model, and about $5,000 of customer support he moved to a help desk with an AI bot. He also replaced a weather API and his Ghost blog without giving a number. We count only the software lines above.

Notice the size of each tool. None of these is a CRM or an ERP. Each one does a single job: resize an image, take a screenshot, check if a site is up. That is where building your own pays off fastest, because the job is narrow and the paid version often charges per call.

What He Still Pays For

He says he has reached his limit. The rest would mean running his own email, his own hard drives and his own GPUs at home, or becoming a domain registrar, and he doesn't want any of that. So he keeps paying for:

• Cloudflare for domains, email sending and photo storage.
• Backblaze B2 for backups.
• Hetzner for every server behind every site.
• xAI for the AI models his sites use for moderation and writing.

In our terms: small single-purpose tools were "Build it." Infrastructure, where the work is keeping hardware and deliverability running, stays "Keep paying." Even there, he didn't stop at keeping. He moved providers and changed settings until the bill matched what he uses.

What We Don't Know

• How many hours he spends keeping his own tools running, and what breaks.
• His total costs a year ago in dollars. He gives the 90% cut, not the starting figure.
• How long the Claude review took.

Where This Does Not Apply

• He is one technical owner who can fix his own tools. A team without that person takes on risk with every replacement.
• Most of these savings are hosting and AI bills, not seat-based software. If your largest costs are per-user plans, the bigger question is build vs. buy, not storage settings.
• Moving moderation or support to AI works for his sites. In regulated work, or with customers who need a person, it may not.
• Shorter backups mean less history. Check what you're legally required to keep before you cut it.

Does This Apply to You?

1. Export the last 12 months of invoices and card charges for every tool and service.
2. Give them to an AI assistant and ask which plans exceed what you use, and which settings, like backup retention, drive the cost.
3. Mark any paid tool that does one narrow job. Those are the cheapest to build.
4. Work out the total cost of ownership before you replace anything, including your own hours.

Most of his savings came from asking a simple question, line by line, of bills that had sat untouched for years. To see whether a bigger tool is worth building, run the Build vs. Buy estimator.