The fire of fires
Daniel Miessler calls it the fire of fires. I read his essay. Then I looked at my credit card statement from a year ago and realized I had already lived it. In a year I replaced about fourteen SaaS subscriptions with one private AI stack. Here's what actually burned.
What Daniel is pointing at
If you haven't read it, go read The Fire of Fires by Daniel Miessler. The core argument is simple. Models got cheap enough that a private assistant can now do what we used to rent whole SaaS products to do. Scheduling. Meeting notes. Research. CRM follow-up. Content outlines. Inbox triage. Each of those is a five-to-fifty dollar subscription. Add them up. That's your SaaS stack. That stack is what Daniel thinks is about to burn.
I think he's right. I also think most people reading his essay will nod at the idea and keep renewing the subscriptions, because the gap between "I agree with that" and "I actually untangled my tools" is wider than it looks. I know because I spent a year closing it.
What I actually replaced
A year ago I was running a small service business. My stack looked like everyone else's. A scheduling link so people could book me. A meeting-notes tool. A research subscription. A CRM that reminded me to follow up. A content-brief generator. A newsletter drafting tool. Each one was a reasonable purchase on its own. Together they were a monthly drip I had stopped noticing.
Over the last year I rebuilt my own working stack on top of a private AI infrastructure I now call the Digital Worker. Here's the honest tally of what got replaced.
- Scheduling tools like Calendly or Motion. Gone. My agent reads my calendar, knows my rules, and proposes times in natural language.
- Meeting-notes tools like Fathom or Fireflies. Mostly gone. I still record, but the summary, the action list, and the follow-up draft all come out of my own stack, and they go straight into my notes.
- A Perplexity Pro research subscription. Gone. My agent does research for me across the open web and writes up the brief in my voice.
- A content-brief tool I was paying for monthly. Gone. Same workflow, one prompt, better output because it already knows my audience.
- CRM follow-up automations I had glued together with paid tools. Gone. Replaced by a small set of scripts that watch my inbox and draft the follow-up for me to review.
- Form-filler and doc-generator subscriptions. Gone.
- Two or three smaller tools I don't even remember the names of. I found them on the credit card statement when I was cancelling.
Rough count: fourteen subscriptions. Some were small. A couple were real. The total was several hundred dollars a month, none of which I miss.
What I didn't try to replace
I want to be careful here. The fire is real. It's also not universal.
My accounting is still in a real accounting product. My email still sits on Google's servers. My domain registrar is still a domain registrar. My phone is still my phone. The core systems of record, the places where regulators or auditors or banks expect to look, stayed where they were. The stuff that burned was the thin subscription layer on top of those systems. The glue. The reminders. The summaries. The outlines. The drafts.
That's the pattern I see again and again. The SaaS stack splits into two piles. Systems of record that store the truth, and assistants that help you act on it. AI is coming for the second pile hard. It's coming for the first pile much more slowly, and probably never for most small businesses.
Why this is a product, not a hobby
My background is ethical hacking. I spent years learning how to map an unfamiliar system, find what it's actually made of, and figure out how the pieces fit. That's the exact mindset I pointed at my own SaaS stack. What does this tool actually do. Where does its data live. What would have to exist for me to stop paying for it. Once I started treating the stack as a system to map instead of a list of products to keep renewing, the replacements showed up on their own.
What surprised me was that after about six months, the stack stopped looking like a personal project and started looking like something I could hand to another small operator. I'd done the work of picking what to replace, what to leave alone, and how to wire the replacements together so they didn't fight each other. That mix is the thing people actually want. They don't want "a model." They want the finished decisions about which tools to light on fire and which to keep.
That's why the Digital Worker tier exists. It is my year of burning my own stack down, compressed into something you can stand up in a couple of weeks instead of a year.
The part Daniel doesn't say out loud
The fire of fires is real, but it has a condition.
Nothing burns if you don't light it. The subscriptions don't cancel themselves. The workflows don't migrate themselves. The team members who built habits around the old tools don't switch without a nudge. I'm not the first person in the world to notice the SaaS stack is replaceable. I might be the first person on my block to actually go and replace it, and the only reason I did was that I treated it like a project with a deadline instead of an interesting idea.
If you read Daniel's essay and nod, give yourself a calendar quarter. Pick three tools. Replace those three. See how it feels. You will be shocked at what you don't miss.
That's how the fire spreads.
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