Vibe-Coded GTM Systems: The Temptation, the Trap, and the Smarter Play

If you’ve been on LinkedIn lately, you’ve probably seen the same genre of post over and over: a screenshot of a GTM platform’s price tag (or stock chart), followed by the triumphant punchline—“So we built our own.”

The story writes itself. AI tools have made it shockingly easy to describe an application in plain English and watch something functional appear on your screen. No traditional dev cycle. No backlog purgatory. No vendor sales call. Just prompts, iterations, and a tool that looks like it was made for you—because, in a sense, it was.

At Domestique , we get why this is catching fire. A lot of GTM teams are paying more every year and feeling like they’re getting less. Not because the software got worse, but because the stack got heavier. More seats. More “bundles.” More features you didn’t ask for. More complexity that requires an admin just to keep it from drifting into chaos. When you’re staring at a four-figure monthly bill and you’ve got an AI subscription that costs less than a team lunch, it’s natural to wonder why you can’t bridge the gap yourself.

And to be fair—sometimes you can.

But here’s the distinction that matters: there’s a big difference between vibe-coding to improve your GTM operations and vibe-coding to replace your GTM system of record.

The first is a smart move. The second is a bet that tends to look brilliant right up until the moment it becomes expensive.

The reason is simple: a CRM—or whatever your core GTM platform is—doesn’t just store data. It’s the nervous system of the revenue engine. It’s where your account truth lives, where pipeline is inspected, where handoffs happen, where attribution gets interpreted, where integrations converge, and where leadership goes when they need an answer they can trust. If that system starts wobbling, GTM doesn’t “run a little slower.” It starts lying to you. And that’s worse than downtime, because you won’t always know it’s happening.

Downtime, though, is a good place to start because it’s the most visible failure mode. When a mature SaaS platform has an outage, your team checks a status page and adjusts for a bit. When your custom-built system goes down, you are the status page. You’re the on-call engineer, the incident manager, and the person fielding panicked messages from sales leadership who can’t see pipeline or prep for calls. That’s not a philosophical risk. It’s operational reality. Reliability is one of those things that feels overpriced until the day you don’t have it.

Security and compliance are the next trap. Early teams often treat this as “future us” work—something that becomes relevant when you’re bigger. But it shows up faster than people think, usually in the form of one enterprise deal you really want. Suddenly there’s a security questionnaire asking how you handle encryption, access control, audit logs, PII, retention policies, and incident response. “We asked an AI to make it secure” isn’t an answer that passes procurement, and the work required to make it a real answer is not a weekend project. Even if you can build software, building governance is a different discipline.

Then there’s maintenance—quiet, compounding, and almost always underestimated. The build phase is fun because it’s all forward motion. But GTM systems don’t stay still. Territories change. Lifecycle stages evolve. Attribution models get revised. Routing logic gets refactored. You add a product line. You introduce partner motion. You bring in a new data source. Over time, the system becomes less about what you originally built and more about how safely you can change it. If the underlying codebase wasn’t designed for evolution—if it’s held together by clever prompts and unspoken assumptions—every change increases fragility. The failures don’t always announce themselves loudly. Sometimes they show up as “why did this lead route wrong?” or “why did pipeline drop?” or “why doesn’t finance trust the forecast?” Those are the slow leaks that cost real money.

So if vibe-coded replacements aren’t a slam dunk, why does this trend feel so intense right now?

Because it’s not just about AI. It’s also about a broader shift happening across GTM software: many platforms that once won by being simple and accessible are moving upmarket. That means higher contract values, more packaging complexity, and more admin overhead. For larger companies, that can be a win—more capability, more control, more depth. For smaller teams, it often feels like being priced into a product you’re not ready to operate. When people complain that a platform has become “too expensive,” what they often mean is: “I’m paying for potential I’m not using, and the overhead to manage it keeps growing.”

That frustration creates a vacuum at the lower end of the market, and AI becomes the most visible form of protest. Vibe-coding isn’t just a technical movement—it’s a buyer psychology movement. It’s a way of saying, “I’m done paying for complexity I didn’t choose.”

There’s also a valuation story floating around this whole conversation. Investors don’t value SaaS purely because it has features. They value it because it has trust—uptime, support, ecosystem, integrations, security posture, and the predictability of a platform that will still be there tomorrow morning. AI has introduced uncertainty into how markets think about those premiums. If building gets cheaper, people start asking why software companies should trade at high multiples. That question alone can create volatility, even before you factor in strategy shifts, competition, or macro conditions.

But here’s the Domestique view: the best response to this moment isn’t to replace your core systems with vibe-coded replicas. It’s to use vibe-coding in the place where it shines—at the edges.

We love the idea of building small, specific tools that remove friction from GTM work without touching the foundation. A custom calculator your reps actually use. A lightweight workflow that standardizes data capture before it hits the database. An internal assistant that creates structured notes and pushes them back into your system of record. A micro-app that solves one annoying operational problem better than any vendor ever will. These are high-leverage wins because they deliver the customization and speed people crave, while leaving the “infrastructure of trust” to the platforms that have spent years earning it.

In other words: don’t build a new heart. Build better limbs.

And if cost is the real pressure—which it often is—then the most powerful move usually isn’t a rebuild. It’s an audit.

Most GTM stacks aren’t expensive because the vendor is evil. They’re expensive because the organization has drifted. Seats were bought during a growth phase and never right-sized. Contacts ballooned. Tools got added for one team and duplicated by another. Workflows multiplied without owners. Reporting got inconsistent, and instead of fixing it, teams bought more software to patch the pain. The result is a stack that’s both pricey and fragile, which is the worst of both worlds.

A clean, disciplined GTM operating system is almost always cheaper than a messy one—regardless of which vendor you use—because you’re not paying for waste, and you’re not bleeding revenue through process inconsistency.

So the takeaway is pretty straightforward. Vibe-coding is real, and it’s going to keep getting better. It will absolutely change how GTM teams build workflows and internal tools. But the mature move is not to gamble your source of truth for the sake of a viral LinkedIn moment. The mature move is to keep the center stable and innovate around it—faster, cheaper, and with far less risk.

If your team is feeling the squeeze between “this platform is too expensive” and “we could build it ourselves,” there’s a third option that usually wins: simplify what you already have, cut what you don’t need, and use AI to build the pieces that vendors never will.

That’s how you get leaner without getting reckless.