Replaced WordPress + 3 paid tools with a custom stack. $48K/month business now runs on $25/month infrastructure.

I run a custom patches business. Iron-on patches, embroidered patches, PVC, chenille, all of it. We sell to businesses, sports teams, fire departments, colleges. The business does around $48K/month in revenue.

For years we ran on the standard small business setup. WordPress with WooCommerce for the storefront. A separate CRM that didn't really fit how we worked. Spreadsheets everywhere. An attendance tracker nobody used properly. About 20 plugins holding the whole thing together.

Monthly cost for all this: over $200. And honestly the money wasn't even the worst part.

The worst part was the fragility. Every WordPress update felt like pulling a thread on a sweater. One plugin update would break something else. The CRM didn't match our actual workflow so half the team just stopped using it. We had customer data in four different places. And our pricing? We sell 9 types of patches with different sizes, quantities, backing options, and border types. Every combination is a different price. WordPress couldn't handle that so customers would submit a form and wait 24 hours for a manual quote.

I got tired of duct-taping everything together. So I rebuilt the whole thing from scratch.

Took about 30 days.

What I actually built:
The storefront handles all 13 product types with a live pricing calculator. Customer picks their patch type, size, quantity, backing, border, and sees the real price instantly. No more waiting for quotes. No more manual calculations.
The CRM tracks every order from first contact through production to delivery. Sales team sees their orders. Production sees what they need to make. Admin sees everything. It handles quotes, PDF generation, customer history, revenue analytics, profit margins, employee clock-in/out, even monthly cost tracking.
Everything runs on one system instead of four.

The numbers that matter:
Before:

Site loaded in 3+ seconds
Monthly tools and hosting: $200+
Quote turnaround: 24 hours manual
Customer data in 4 different places
Every update was a gamble

After:

Site loads under 1 second
Monthly cost: under $25
Quotes: instant via live calculator
Everything in one system
Nothing breaks when I sleep

What it actually costs to run:
The whole thing runs on free tiers. Vercel for hosting. Supabase for the database and auth. Sanity for content management. Sentry for error tracking. The only things I pay for are Zoho for emails (about $4/month) and the domain ($12/year).
Total: roughly $25/month running a $48K/month business.
What I'd tell other founders:
If your business runs on WordPress with a bunch of plugins and separate tools that don't talk to each other, you're spending more time managing your tools than running your business. I didn't realize how much mental energy went into maintaining the old setup until I didn't have to anymore.
The rebuild wasn't easy. 30 days of intense work. But now the business basically runs itself from a tech perspective. I spend zero time on maintenance, zero time on plugin updates, zero time debugging why something broke overnight.
The gap between where you are and where you could be is probably smaller than you think.
I used Claude Code for a lot of the development work. AI didn't make the architecture decisions or design the product but it made the building part dramatically faster. If you're technical enough to direct the build, AI tools make solo development realistic in a way it wasn't two years ago.
Happy to answer any questions about the build, the costs, the migration process, or anything else. Been through it recently so it's all fresh.

I now help other business owners do the same rebuild through my agency, PandaCodeGen. If you're running WordPress or Shopify and paying hundreds a month in tools that barely integrate, the migration math in this post applies to you too.