We did the same. We replaced a proprietary build system with our own. The SaaS product we used was super expensive, had a very gougy licensing scheme, had a bunch of features that either didn't work for us, or were so overcomplicated, that we ended up not using them. Before the rewrite, we bypassed like 90% of the internal features, and relied on custom scripts to do everything.

Every SaaS feature in my experience ends up being a mess due to having to support a billion use cases, and figuring it out is more trouble than its worth, might not be able to do what you want, might be buggy.

But even if you do all that stuff, you end up with a mess that can be replaced with 5 lines of shell script. And many more people know shell scripting than figuring out the arcane BS that goes on inside that tool.

It's the eternal lowcode story.

> 'doesn’t make the beer taste better'

I'd say it did. Having a CI/CD pipeline where you don't have to wait for other people's builds, the build logic is identical to what's running on dev PCs, and everything is all-around faster, and more understandable (you can read the whole source) makes testing easier, and surprises less frequent.

All in all, making a hour-long CI/CD turnaround time into 5 minutes or less has been an incredible productivity boost.