Can You Vibe Code A Membership System? Expectation Vs. Reality
The recent explosion of vibe coding has many club committees asking the same question: Can we use AI to build a custom membership system and finally ditch our monthly SaaS subscription? While the idea of a free, AI-generated platform sounds like a dream for your budget, the reality of running a secure, functional club ecosystem on AI code is entirely different. Let’s break down the expectation versus the reality of AI-built software.
By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of vibe coding. The process of using AI to build websites or apps for you, rather than paying someone to do so. If you haven’t, read about it here: The Dangers Of Vibe Coding & AI-Built Websites. You’ve probably heard stories about people building whole new systems for themselves for free. People say that Vibe Coding will kill off SaaS products. You may have even had a member of your admin team ask you to look into it and suggest ditching your paid system for an AI-vibe-coded one.
So, let’s look at Vibe coding, see how it compares to SaaS, and look at the reality of vibe-coded websites, the pros and cons, and what you can expect in reality from an AI vibe-coded system. Just for reference, SaaS stands for "Software as a Service." It’s software you pay a subscription to use over the internet, that is maintained and improved over time, think Netflix, Member Jungle or even Microsoft Word.
Before we get started, let’s address the elephant in the room. I work for Member Jungle. Member Jungle is a SaaS system. People are saying that vibe coding will kill off the SaaS industry; some people have even taken to calling it the “SaaSpocalypse”, a term so dumb I think I dislocated my eyes they rolled so hard.
Nonetheless, I technically have a bias when it comes to comparing SaaS and vibe coding. So, two things. First, I promise to be unbiased and only give you the facts so you can draw your own conclusions. Second, I don’t actually think I’m biased on this one, because I don’t think vibe coding is a threat to SaaS. Will it change how SaaS companies do business? Yeah, to some extent, for sure. But ultimately, vibe coding is far from an existential threat to SaaS.
I think vibe coding is no more a world-ender for SaaS than the advent of 3D printing was a world-ender for the toy industry. Yeah, any punter could technically go print their kid any toy they wanted, but when your five-year-old asks for a Barbie, you go to the store and buy one.
Quick Answer: Should You Vibe Code Your Club's Membership System?
While using AI to vibe code a custom website might seem like a clever way to dodge a monthly subscription fee, it introduces massive operational risks. Here is why you should avoid it:
- The Hidden Costs: You might save on a SaaS subscription, but you will pay for server hosting, SSL certificates, and hundreds of hours of your volunteers' weekend time.
- The Facade Problem: AI is great at building a pretty login screen but struggles to connect the complex systems needed for automated renewals, event ticketing, and mobile apps.
- Inevitable Tech Rot: Without a dedicated human development team constantly updating the code, your AI-built system will rapidly break as web browsers and payment gateways update.
- Severe Security Liability: AI prioritises making code "work" over making it secure, frequently leaving massive loopholes and making your club legally liable for any leaked member data.
- The Bus Factor: When the single volunteer who prompted the AI leaves, your club is left with an undocumented, unreadable system that no one else knows how to fix.
Are Vibe Coded Systems Cheaper Than SAAS Systems?
Vibe Coding Price Expectations
One of the main promises of a vibe-coded system is that it is cheaper than a SaaS system. Instead of paying for Member Jungle or MailChimp, you can build a system with AI for much, much cheaper. At first glance, this is absolutely true. If you sit down with ChatGPT and get it to help you code, it’s free; if you pay for a system like Manus or Softr so you can have assistance and some form of guardrails while making your system, it may be cheaper than your standard SaaS systems, depending on your needs.
Vibe Coding Price Reality
Firstly, unless you can already code to a decent extent, you are going to need to pay for a premium vibe coding service to help you make what you actually need. For example, the vibe coding system Softr allows you to use their AI to build any mobile app you want, but their free version limits you to just 10 app users. If you want more than 100 app users, you have to upgrade to their business package, which is $269 USD a month, and even that caps you at 500 app users. That is more than double the price of Member Jungle’s standard package, which allows for 750 members.
Once your system is built, you still have plenty of other things that need to be paid for: server hosting, data storage, domain names, and SSL certificates, all on top of your monthly payments to whatever vibe coding service you used.
So, in reality, if you are a professional software developer and spend your days coding and building websites and apps, you could use AI to create a membership system, app, or email system for a low cost. Just be sure that you are ready to maintain it for the club in the long run. However, if you are anyone else, building and running a vibe-coded system will cost about the same, if not more, than a standard SaaS system.
Can Vibe-Coded Systems Do Everything SaaS Systems Can?
Vibe Coding Features Expectations
Another key promise of vibe coding is that a vibe-coded system can do everything a SaaS system can do. The general pitch being, “Why pay some company for something you can make yourself with AI?”
Again, this is also true, but with some notable caveats. Yes, if you had enough time and you're willing to pay for a system to help you, you could replace pretty much any SaaS system with a vibe-coded one. You could replace Member Jungle, Microsoft Word, Survey Monkey and whatever else with systems you used AI to build.
Vibe Coding Features Reality
The reality is that AI is great at building facades, but it struggles with the nitty-gritty stuff that actually makes things work. It’s a bit like a gorgeous concept car that looks mind-blowing but would be horrific to drive. Or a display home that doesn’t have the electricity or plumbing hooked up. Or an influencer who, despite his Carhartt jacket and beanie, couldn’t tell a spanner from a socket.
Yes, that is multi-millionaire pop star Justin Bieber wearing a Carhartt jacket. Why rich people have such an obsession with trying to look working class, I’ll never know.
If you ask an AI to build a membership website, it will whip up a beautiful home page, a sleek login screen, and a table to store names and emails. It will look like a real system, and on the surface, it will be very impressive. But as many people are finding out, it struggles when it's time to actually get the work done. As tech publication The New Stack recently reported: “ACM's Technology Policy Council finds vibe coding platforms skip core engineering practices, threatening security, maintainability, and the junior developer talent pipeline.”
AI struggles with making complex systems that actually work. Trying to get an AI to string all of those moving parts together without a human software architect guiding it is an absolute nightmare. Because the AI doesn't genuinely understand the context of your club, you will quickly find yourself in an endless loop of asking it to fix the event ticketing, only to realise its "fix" just completely broke the member renewal portal.
SaaS platforms have spent years, sometimes decades, with teams of human developers refining complex features so they work flawlessly together.
So, can a vibe-coded system do everything a SaaS system can do? Technically, maybe, if you spend hundreds of hours fighting with it. But for the vast majority of clubs, it will be a step backwards that just sort of works. It will feel bare-bones, clunky, and your members will definitely notice the difference.
What Happens To A Vibe-Coded System Six Months From Now?
Vibe Coding Maintenance Expectations
The absolute dream of vibe coding is that you spend a few weekends building your shiny new club portal, you hit publish, and then you dust your hands off. It’s built, it’s live, and you never have to worry about it again. Unfortunately, that is just not reality.
Vibe Coding Maintenance Reality
The SaaS systems you would be replacing with a vibe-coded system have entire development and tech teams that work full-time to keep the software running, compliant, and always adapting. If you use AI to bash together a new system or app, it might be amazing today, but unless you plan on bringing in a team to maintain and continually upgrade it, your new system will soon start to rot as it becomes rapidly outdated.
Suddenly, your members can't submit a form on an iPhone, or your payment page starts spitting out weird error codes. So, you go back to the AI and ask it to fix the problem. But now, the AI has to decipher the code it generated six months ago, inject a patch, and hope it doesn't break something else in the process. Over time, your sleek custom system turns into a Frankenstein codebase, held together by digital duct tape and increasingly frantic prompts.
The reason the SaaS business model is so successful is that it lets you use a great product without being responsible for its upkeep.
Is An AI-Built Membership System Actually Secure?
Vibe Coding Security Expectations
Because AI is incredibly advanced and built by tech giants, we tend to assume that it is smart and the code it produces must be bulletproof. It is basically a supercomputer, so surely it knows how to build a safe, secure login portal and database for our members. The expectation is that AI won't make the same silly security mistakes a human amateur would.
Vibe Coding Security Reality
The reality is that, in its current form, AI is an idiot. It isn’t actual artificial intelligence; it’s just a giant probability engine that uses its massive databanks to predict the next most likely word to say to satisfy its user. It doesn’t consider things, it doesn’t think, and it doesn’t plan; it just regurgitates information in an order it thinks is most likely to answer the user's prompt.
What this means is that it will take the path of least resistance to make your website “work”, and that often means leaving massive security loopholes open. For example, we are already seeing a huge rise in vibe-coded projects accidentally exposing API keys in their code. This is essentially leaving your digital credit cards sitting out in plain text for automated bots to scrape and steal.
But the biggest issue here isn't just the code; it's the legal liability.
If a SaaS system experiences a security threat, they have dedicated cybersecurity teams, firewalls, bank-level encryption, and legal infrastructure to handle it; not to mention the time and money they spend proactively preventing it. If you build your own system using AI and it accidentally leaks your members' personal data, passwords, or payment details, the legal and financial liability falls squarely on your club's committee. You are the ones who built it, so you are the ones on the hook.
SaaS platforms don't just provide software; they provide peace of mind and shoulder the burden of liability, so your committee doesn't have to.
What Happens When Your Vibe Coder Quits?
Vibe Coding Independence Expectations
One of the most appealing ideas behind vibe coding your own system is true independence. The expectation is that your club will finally own its software outright. You won't be tied to a third-party tech company, you won't have to wait on a support desk to answer your tickets, and you will be completely self-sufficient. It feels like taking back control.
Vibe Coding Independence Reality
In reality, you are only getting independence from a third-party software company if you use ChatGPT to build your entire system from scratch. If you are using dedicated vibe coding software, as we talked about earlier, you are just shifting your monthly dependence over to them instead.
The real issue, however, is that you are reverting to the exact same trap a lot of clubs fell into in the early 2000s: one tech-savvy member builds the entire website, which is great until that member leaves and no one else knows how to use the system. Now, however, it's even worse, because that one tech-savvy member might not even actually know how the system works since the AI did so much of the heavy lifting.
In the tech world, there is a concept known as the "bus factor." It asks, “If the person who built this system gets hit by a bus tomorrow, would the project still work?” The point being, you don’t want a system that falls to pieces if one person gets pancaked by the 205.
When the enthusiastic committee member who spent their weekends vibe coding your new database eventually steps down, gets a new job, or simply burns out, what exactly are they handing over to their successor? They are leaving behind a highly customised, completely undocumented black box of AI-generated code. There is no instruction manual, no customer service hotline, and no one else on the committee who understands how to log in to the server or prompt the AI to fix it when it breaks.
When that volunteer leaves, the system essentially dies with them. The new committee will be completely locked out of their own infrastructure and will likely have to abandon it and start from scratch.
Ultimately, if you replace a SaaS system with an AI vibe-coded one, you aren’t gaining your independence as much as you are moving your dependence from a team of highly trained tech professionals to Ron. Don’t get me wrong, Ron’s a great guy, but you’re putting a lot of faith in him.
Vibe-Coded Membership Software In Reality
Could you replace every service your organisation uses with a vibe-coded one? Yes.
Would it be cheaper? Probably not.
Would it be better? Almost certainly not.
Would it stand the test of time? Definitely not.
Would it be as secure? Oh dear god, no.
Would it be more independent? Maybe.
The reality is that vibe coding isn’t that useful to the average person. It allows professional developers to work faster. It makes it easier for software engineers to prototype custom apps. It allows SaaS companies to get more work done. But for the rest of us, it’s just not a game-changer. When it comes to managing real people's money, securing personal data, and running your organisation professionally, vibe coding isn’t the answer. It’s simply too unreliable and too insecure.
To bring it back to that 3D printer analogy from the start. People could go out, buy a 3D printer, and make their kids all the toys they could ever dream of. But in reality, that isn’t practical, economical, or safe. The people 3D printers actually helped are the big toy companies. They use them to prototype new toys more quickly and easily. Vibe coding will be exactly the same. It will allow SaaS companies to improve their products faster than ever before. It won't replace them.
Finally, let me leave the world of facts and speculate for a moment. This sudden hype around vibe coding is likely just AI companies scrambling to make their products profitable. OpenAI is by far the most famous AI company on the planet. They posted an estimated $9 billion loss in 2025. In 2026, they are projected to lose $14 billion. Despite AI apparently "being the future," these companies are haemorrhaging cash. They are only staying afloat because tech giants keep dumping money into them.
The idea that the average person will suddenly use AI to build, manage, and maintain complicated software feels like a cynical marketing push. They just desperately need a return on the billions they keep throwing at this.
The Final Verdict On Vibe Coding In 2026
Ultimately, the decision is yours, but I think you’d find that pretty much every software developer would recommend you not mess with this. Don't fall for the hype. Protect your members. Protect your data. Choose a platform that actually works.
If you want to read more about the realities of AI software and keeping your club secure, check out these articles: