Replacing software subscriptions at Blue Sky Farms

What we found

Blue Sky Farms runs on software the farm owns. Before that, the farm paid for annually licensed software products and worked around what they could not do, waiting on vendors for changes. We built software the farm owns with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, replacing the licensed products with tools that fit how the farm runs. Several of those tools run Claude inside them. The farm reports $300,000 a year saved on software costs so far.

This is the record of the work so far. The figure and the quote below belong to Blue Sky Farms and are published with their permission, confirmed by their CFO. They describe one farm and one set of products. Another business with another set will have its own arithmetic, and we say so before anyone carries these numbers into a budget meeting.

The annual license

An annually licensed product carries two costs, the invoice and the work people do around the gaps.

The invoice is the easy one to see. It arrives once a year for as long as the business uses the product, and it arrives whether or not the product did what the business needed that year.

The second cost is quieter. When a product will not do something the farm needs, people build a habit around the gap. Someone keeps a spreadsheet beside the system, enters the same number twice, or rebuilds a report by hand because the one in the product shows the wrong slice. Those habits take time every week, and every new person has to be taught them.

A third thing shows up in the way a year goes. The vendor decides what the software does next, so a request from the farm lands on a roadmap the farm does not control and the farm waits. That wait is the part Josh Mcdonald named when we talked about what had changed.

One product at a time

We replaced the licensed products one at a time, and the farm kept running the whole way through.

The order matters. We look at the size of the annual bill first, because the arithmetic has to work before anything else does. Then we look at how well the work can be written down. A product whose job the team can describe step by step is a good early replacement. Work where a person weighs something new every day stays where it is for now.

The licensed product keeps running until the replacement is doing the job. That overlap costs a little for a few weeks, and it means nobody at the farm is stuck waiting on us during a week when the work will not wait.

Each replacement is small enough to check on its own. The farm can see what the new tool does, say what is wrong with it, and get it fixed before the next one starts. What we learn in one replacement goes into the next, and the licensed products still in place set the order of the work after that.

How we built it with Claude

Every Blue Sky app is built with Claude Code, and several of them run Claude in production.

The build side is a shared base. Each new app starts from the same template and the same set of Claude Code instructions, so login, the database, testing and deployment work the same way in every app. Claude Code writes the code from a written description of the farm's work, and we review it before it ships. That shared base is what lets us replace products one at a time without each new app becoming its own thing to maintain.

Inside the live apps, Claude does daily work. The fleet app tracks more than 200 vehicles and pieces of equipment across Texas, New Mexico and Kansas. Staff ask it questions in plain English and Claude answers from the fleet records. It can also open a work order, mark a recall resolved, or email a site manager. Claude reads registration and purchase documents too, and pulls out the VIN and the other details, so nobody types them in.

The investor portal for one of the farm's entities uses Claude to answer an investor's questions from that investor's own records, and to draft investment summaries for the fund team.

Some apps need no model at all. The scale-house app replaced a licensed ticketing product at nine sites. It reads the scale directly and prints the ticket. Claude Code built it, and nothing in it needs a model to run.

The savings line

The saving is annual and it repeats.

The farm stopped paying for the licensed products that have been replaced. That money stays with the farm again every year it runs software it owns, which makes the saving easy to check against last year's invoices.

Owning software has its own costs and we name them plainly. The farm pays to host the system, to fix what breaks, and to build what it asks us for next. The $300,000 a year is what is left after those costs, measured against bills that arrived every year whether or not the products fit.

The words "so far" carry weight here. The replacement work is still going, so the line is a running total on a stack that is smaller than it was.

What ownership changed

The farm owns the tools and changes them when it needs to.

Here is how Josh Mcdonald, Blue Sky Farms' CFO, describes it:

"We were paying for a stack of software subscriptions every year and still working around what they couldn't do. Plainpath replaced them one at a time with tools we own and that fit how the farm actually runs. We're saving six figures a year, and we stopped waiting on vendors to fix things."

A change request at the farm is now a piece of work with a date on it. Someone at the farm decides what the software should do next, and the schedule is a conversation between the farm and us.

The way the farm runs is written into the software now, including the order of the steps, the names the team uses for things, and the checks that matter in a busy season.

Limits

These figures belong to one farm and one set of products.

Three things have to be true before replacing licensed software with software you own is worth the effort.

• The annual bill is large enough that the arithmetic works. A small subscription will not pay for a build.
• The team knows its own work well enough to describe it, because that description is the specification.
• Someone inside owns the software after we leave, asks for changes, and gets them. When nobody owns it, people drift back to their old steps and the software stops fitting. We wrote about builds nobody owns in why most AI pilots fail.

A build can also be far smaller than a stack of products. At Genesco Sports Enterprises, a month-end reconciliation that took the CFO about 4 days by hand now runs in about 60 seconds, and the record of that build is on this site. At McHur Care the replacement was one system, a custom EHR the practice now runs on every day.

To see where your own stack stands, write down every product you pay for each year, what it costs, and what it does. Then add the steps your team performs because the product will not do them, and the requests you have been waiting on a vendor to deliver. That list is the start of the arithmetic. Our walk-through for building it is how to run your first AI audit in an afternoon, and our audit agent is free and will run the same interview with you. If you want a person to check the list and write a build plan against it, that is Discovery.

Frequently asked questions

What did Plainpath build for Blue Sky Farms?

We built software the farm owns with Claude Code, Anthropic's coding agent, replacing the licensed products with tools that fit how the farm runs. Several of those tools run Claude inside them. The products were replaced one at a time, with each licensed product kept running until its replacement was doing the job.

How much did Blue Sky Farms save?

The farm reports $300,000 a year saved on software costs so far. It is a running total, because the replacement work is still going.

Does replacing licensed software with software you own make sense for every business?

No. The annual bill has to be large enough that the arithmetic works, the team has to know its own work well enough to describe it, and someone inside has to own the software after the build. When one of those is missing, a smaller build on a single process is the better first step.

What does owning software cost?

Hosting, fixing what breaks, and the work of building what you ask for next. At Blue Sky Farms the $300,000 a year is what is left after those costs, measured against bills that arrived every year whether or not the products fit.

Who owns the software Plainpath builds?

The client does. Blue Sky Farms owns its tools and changes them when it needs to. A change request becomes a piece of work with a date on it, scheduled between the farm and us.