In the last decade, we've seen an explosion of "Developer Experience" (DevEx) tools. Every one of them promises to make your team faster for "only" $50/user/month. If you have 20 developers, you're looking at $12,000/year just for one tool.

Most of these tools are just fancy wrappers around standard CI/CD logic. You can build 80% of their functionality yourself using GitHub Actions and own the infrastructure forever.

1. Replacing Expensive Preview URL Services

Services that provide preview URLs for Every PR are great, but they can be pricey.

• The DIY Version: Use GitHub Actions to build your app and deploy it to a sub-folder in an S3 bucket or a Vercel staging project.
• The Result: Total control over the lifecycle of your previews and $0 in additional subscription costs.

2. Automating Environment Provisioning

Stop manually clicking buttons in AWS or Terraform Cloud.

• The DIY Version: Use the workflow_dispatch trigger. Create a workflow that takes inputs (region, instance type, environment name) and runs your Terraform/OpenTofu scripts.
• The Result: A self-service portal for your developers right inside the GitHub UI.

3. Custom Internal Dashboards

You don't need a heavy monitoring suite to know if your builds are healthy.

• The DIY Version: Use GitHub Pages. Have an Action run every morning that queries the GitHub API for your build success rates and generates a simple HTML status page.
• The Result: A high-speed, zero-cost transparency dashboard for your entire company.

4. Why Ownership Wins

When you build your own internal platform on GitHub Actions:

1. No Vendor Lock-in: Your logic is in a standard YAML file.
2. Unified Security: Everything is governed by your existing GitHub permissions.
3. Infinite Customization: You aren't limited by what a SaaS founder thinks is a "good feature."

Ownership is the ultimate form of scalability. In our next post, we'll see how to leverage this mindset to track your competitors automatically.