Curative axed its $600k Salesforce contract after vibecoding a CRM in 2 months
Fred Turner, CEO and founder of health insurance startup Curative, just gave the SaaSpocalypse thesis a real-world data point. On the “20VC with Harry Stebbings” podcast, Turner said Curative canceled its Salesforce CRM contract and replaced it with an internally built tool that AI helped develop in two months.
The canceled contract cost $600,000 a year. Turner confirmed the cancellation directly, and a Curative spokesperson told Business Insider the company had filed a notification of cancellation for the Salesforce CRM contract. The company still uses Slack, which Salesforce acquired in 2020 for $27.7 billion.
The Broader Cut
The Salesforce cancellation is not a one-off. Turner said Curative plans to cut roughly 80% of its SaaS spending in 2026, redirecting that budget toward AI. He acknowledged the tradeoff: maintaining a custom-built system is, in his words, “definitely one of the most challenging pieces.” He still recommends the approach to other businesses.
A Salesforce spokesperson pushed back, noting that 150,000 companies still use its platforms and that its tools are built to handle complex healthcare regulations like HIPAA, something a two-month vibecoded CRM will need to demonstrate it can match over time.
Where the AI Spend Is Going
Curative’s Anthropic costs have increased 6x every month for the past six to seven months, starting from “a couple of tens of thousands of dollars” and now reaching millions of dollars a month, according to Turner. He said the company keeps finding new things to do with it, though he expects that growth rate to slow eventually.
The clearest example of the economics is Gwen, a bespoke AI agent Curative built to negotiate contracts with doctors and healthcare providers. Before Gwen, one contract cost an average of $1,500 to $2,000 to complete. Gwen’s average cost per contract is about $70. Turner said that cost difference lets the company target 10 to 20 times the contract volume it could reach with a human team. He also said the economics would still hold even if Anthropic were to quintuple its prices.
The Operator Takeaway
This is the live version of a bet a lot of operators are considering: pay a SaaS vendor for a polished, compliant, maintained product, or build something specific to your workflow and own the cost structure. Curative is a funded startup with engineering resources, which matters. The maintenance caveat Turner raised is real. But the contract negotiation numbers are hard to argue with: $70 versus $1,500 per transaction changes what volume is possible, not just what it costs.
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