Forem: Oleh Kem

How we quantified SaaS Lock-In and LLM Costs

Oleh Kem — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 14:08:11 +0000

The "Contact Sales" button is a technical debt indicator. Every time a vendor hides their pricing behind a form, they are adding friction to your stack's scalability.

We spent months building a pipeline that tracks hundreds of SaaS pricing pages daily. But raw data is just noise. To make it actionable, we built a dashboard that treats software procurement like engineering: with logic, formulas, and daily data pipelines.

Here is the technical breakdown of the three core engines we’ve just deployed at comparedge.com.

1. The Vendor Lock-In Score: Quantifying the "Exit Cost"

Most teams choose software based on features. Smart teams choose based on how hard it is to leave.

We developed the Vendor Lock-In Score to measure this. It’s not a gut feeling. It’s a weight-based matrix looking at:

Data Portability: Does the API allow full bulk exports?
Integration Depth: How many proprietary hooks are you forced to use?
Contractual Friction: Auto-renewal clauses and seat minimums.

The Logic: If a tool scores an 8/10 on Lock-In, your "cheap" $50/mo starter plan is actually a high-risk liability. We’ve mapped this for hundreds of tools (on our roadmap to cross the 1,000+ mark), so you can see the trap before you step in it.

2. Stack Builder: Moving Beyond the Spreadsheet

Procurement usually happens in a messy Excel sheet. It breaks. It’s never updated.

The Stack Builder is our solution for "Infrastructure as a Budget."

You select tools across 28+ growing categories (CRMs, Hosting, Security).
The engine pulls daily-synced prices (no more stale data).
It calculates the total monthly and annual burn, accounting for per-seat vs. flat-rate scaling.

It’s essentially a sandbox for your CFO. You can swap a $200/mo CRM for a $50/mo alternative and instantly see the ripple effect on your total stack cost.

3. LLM Price Calculator: The 2026 Margin Saver

LLM pricing is a moving target. With 6 providers and 25+ models (from GPT-4o to Llama 3 on Groq), calculating token costs for a production app is a nightmare.

Our LLM Calculator normalizes this. Input your expected monthly tokens (Input/Output), and it spits out a side-by-side comparison.

Why it matters: We found that switching providers for the same model can save up to 40% in margins.
Data Freshness: Since we sync daily, we catch those "stealth" price drops the moment they hit the docs.

The Infrastructure of Transparency

Everything we do is Open Data.

GitHub: Fork the logic.
Kaggle: Use the raw SQLite/CSV dumps for your own models.
Railway API: Hit our public end-points (no auth required) to pipe these prices directly into your internal tools.

We are building a public utility. Software is the biggest line item for modern companies after payroll. It shouldn't be a black box.

Try the dashboard: comparedge.com/dashboard
Code & Data: comparedge.com/open-data

No "Contact Sales" buttons were harmed in the making of this project.

How I Used ComparEdge to Outmaneuver Competitors Without Leaving VS Code

Oleh Kem — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 11:29:02 +0000

It was 2:14 AM. My third cup of cold brew had long since turned into a jittery regret, and I was staring at a Jira ticket that felt more like a personal insult than a task.

"Feature Parity Analysis: Why is Competitor X’s search latency 200ms lower than ours? Also, check if their new pricing tier makes our 'Pro' plan obsolete. Need answer by 9 AM Standup." - The PM.

If you’re a developer, you know this feeling. It’s the "Competitive Research" black hole. Usually, this involves a miserable cycle of opening forty tabs, digging through obfuscated minified JS, scraping public API docs that haven't been updated since 2022, and pretending to understand a marketing executive's blog post about "revolutionary architecture."

Most competitive analysis tools are built for the marketing department. They give you SEO rankings, "estimated traffic," and "share of voice." For a developer trying to figure out why a rival's bundle size is 40% smaller or how their API handles rate-limiting, those tools are about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Then I found ComparEdge.

I didn't just use it to finish that ticket. I used it to dismantle the competitor's technical advantage while my boss was still eating his morning bagel. Here is a look at how I integrate "Product Intelligence" into my actual dev workflow.

The 2:00 AM Epiphany: Why Traditional Tools Fail Us

Before I dive into the how, let's talk about the why. Traditional tools fail developers because they treat software like a static billboard. But software is a living, breathing stack of dependencies, API endpoints, and community sentiment.

When my PM asks why we’re slower, they don’t want a SimilarWeb chart. They want to know:

Are they using a specific Rust-based library for their search indexing?
Did they switch from a REST architecture to gRPC for their internal microservices?
Is their community screaming about a bug in their latest PR that we can capitalize on?

Comparedge is the first tool I’ve found that actually speaks "Engineer."

A Day in the Life: From Deadline Dread to Competitive Dominance

08:00 AM - Benchmarking Without the "Trial and Error"

The first thing I did was run a Real-time Code Quality Benchmark. Instead of manually cloning the competitor’s public GitHub repos or trying to deconstruct their front-end, I plugged their core URLs into ComparEdge.

The output wasn't just a "score." It was a side-by-side comparison of code complexity metrics. I saw that while our codebase was cleaner in terms of linting, they were utilizing a specific edge-caching strategy that we had overlooked.

[Insight: Code Quality Dashboard]
The ComparEdge UI shows a split-screen. On the left, our 'Project Phoenix.' On the right, 'Competitor X.' It highlights a 15% difference in Cyclomatic Complexity and points directly to their middleware implementation.

09:30 AM - The API Diff that Saved My Morning

By the time the standup started, I had already performed an Automated API Endpoint Comparison.

Most of us spend hours writing curl commands to see what changed in a competitor’s update. ComparEdge’s "Diffing" engine does this automatically. It flagged that Competitor X had silently introduced three new undocumented endpoints related to "QuickSearch."

I didn't just tell my PM "they are faster." I told them: "They’ve shifted their search logic to a GraphQL gateway with persisted queries, reducing the payload size by 60%."

The room went silent. That’s the power of having actual data. ⚡

11:00 AM - Tracking the "Stack Evolution"

Technical debt is the silent killer. I used ComparEdge to look at their Tech Stack Evolution. It showed me a timeline of their migrations. They hadn't just "gotten faster"; they had slowly transitioned from a monolithic Express app to a distributed Lambda architecture over the last six months.

Seeing the pace of their evolution allowed me to predict their next move. If they’re moving toward edge functions now, they’ll likely be optimizing for international markets next month. We needed to beat them there.

The Unconventional Use Cases (The "Secret Sauce")

If you think ComparEdge is just for "spying" on the big guys, you’re thinking too small. Here are two ways I’ve used it that aren't in the manual:

1. The "Interview God Mode"

I recently helped a friend prepare for a Senior Dev Interview at a top-tier fintech. We used ComparEdge to analyze that company’s tech stack against their three biggest rivals.
By the time he sat down, he knew more about their community sentiment (via GitHub PR friction) and their pricing-to-infrastructure ratio than the recruiter did. He was able to say, "I noticed your last three major releases had significant regressions in the auth module compared to [Competitor B]-here is how I would fix that pipeline."
He got the job. 🚀

2. Open Source Dominance Strategy

If you’re maintaining an OS library, you are in a constant war for "stars" and contributors. I use the Community Sentiment Analysis to see where other libraries are failing. If people are complaining in the "Issues" section of a rival library about poor TypeScript support, I prioritize TS in my next release. ComparEdge aggregates this sentiment across GitHub and StackOverflow, so I don’t have to.

How it Stacks Up

Feature	ComparEdge	GitHub Copilot	SimilarWeb
Primary Target	Technical Strategy	Individual Coding	Marketing/SEO
API Diffing	Automated & Real-time	None	None
Stack Evolution	2-Year Historical Trace	None	Basic
Code Benchmarking	Cross-Repo Analytics	Inline suggestions	None
Pricing vs. Tech	Correlated Analysis	None	Pricing only

Getting Under the Hood: The ComparEdge API

For the devs who want to automate this (because if it isn't automated, it isn't real), ComparEdge has a surprisingly robust API. I’ve written a small helper script that triggers a Slack alert whenever a competitor’s Bundle Size increases by more than 5% or their API Response Time dips.

const axios = require('axios');

async function getCompetitiveEdge() {
  const API_KEY = process.env.COMPARE_EDGE_KEY;
  const targetCompetitor = 'competitor-vanguard-app';

  try {
    const response = await axios.get(`https://api.comparedge.com/v1/analyze/diff`, {
      params: { 
        base: 'my-awesome-app', 
        target: targetCompetitor,
        metrics: ['tech_stack', 'api_latency', 'bundle_size']
      },
      headers: { 'Authorization': `Bearer ${API_KEY}` }
    });

    const { tech_stack_diff, performance_alerts } = response.data;

    if (tech_stack_diff.added.includes('Next.js 14')) {
      console.log("Alert: Competitor migrated to Next 14. Expect SEO/Perf boost.");
    }

    console.log(`Current Latency Gap: ${performance_alerts.latency_delta}ms`);

  } catch (error) {
    console.error("Analysis failed. They might be obfuscating more than usual.", error);
  }
}

getCompetitiveEdge();

The Future: AI-Driven Competitor Analysis

We are entering an era where "writing code" is only 20% of the job. The other 80% is Architectural Decision Making.

In the next two years, AI won't just suggest the next line of code; it will suggest the next strategic move. Tools like ComparEdge are the precursors to this. Soon, your IDE will likely have a sidebar that says:

"Your competitor just updated their database schema to support vector embeddings. Based on your current community sentiment, you should implement a similar feature within 3 weeks to prevent 10% churn."

If you aren't tracking your competitors at a granular, technical level, you aren't just falling behind-you're flying blind.

Final Takeaway

I didn't finish that 2 AM ticket with "guesses." I finished it with a multi-page report backed by hard technical data. My PM was happy, my CTO was impressed, and I got to go home early the next day.

Stop treating competitive analysis like a chore for the "business people." It’s an engineering discipline.

Ready to see who’s actually winning? Check out ComparEdge and start building with an unfair advantage.

Have you ever found a "smoking gun" in a competitor's public repo? Let's talk about the weirdest things you've found during technical teardowns in the comments! 💬

Why We’re Building ComparEdge and a Chrome Extension Called Compare Advisor

Oleh Kem — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:18:42 +0000

We’re building ComparEdge - a better way to compare software, AI tools, and crypto products

A few months ago, we kept running into the same problem:

Every time we needed to choose a tool, we ended up opening 15 tabs, reading the same generic reviews, and still not feeling confident about the decision.

So we built ComparEdge.

It’s a comparison site for people who want to actually understand the difference between tools - not just read another list of “top 10 best apps”.

Right now, we’re covering:

SaaS products
AI tools
Crypto products
Software alternatives
Side-by-side comparisons that focus on features, pricing, and use cases

What makes it different

We’re trying to keep it simple:

no fluff
no paid ranking bias
no recycled affiliate-style content
clear comparisons that help people make a decision faster

The idea is to create a place where you can quickly see:

what a product does
how it compares to others
who it’s really for
whether it’s actually worth trying

What’s next

We’re also working on a Chrome extension called Compare Advisor.

The goal is to make comparisons available right where people are browsing - so instead of leaving the page and searching manually, you can get context and alternatives instantly.

Why we’re posting this

We’re still early, and we’re building in public.

If you’re into:

SaaS
AI tools
crypto products
product research
comparison UX
browser extensions

-we’d love feedback.

ComparEdge
https://comparedge.com

And the extension we’re building:

Compare Advisor (This page is under development)
https://comparedge.com/extension

If you’ve built something similar, or if you have opinions on what makes a comparison site actually useful, I’d love to hear them.