We rebuilt 80% of a real, later-acquired SaaS product in five days — to find out where competitive value actually lives.
Rindegastos is a Santiago-built expense-management platform used by more than 4,500 companies; in 2025 it was acquired by Visma, the Norwegian software group that does €2.8 billion a year across two million customers. The question was simple: if the product is the moat, how long would it actually take to rebuild it from scratch with modern AI-assisted development? We decided to find out.
Starting from a blank canvas, we built Rinde YNK — a fully functional expense management platform. AI-assisted coding, rapid prototyping, and deep domain knowledge compressed what would traditionally take months into a single work week. Receipt scanning, approval workflows, reporting dashboards, multi-currency support — the core feature set that enterprises pay for.
The finished product replicated roughly 80% of Rindegastos' core functionality in five days, built by one engineer. Which is the uncomfortable part: if the feature set can be rebuilt in a week, the defensibility was never in the feature set. It was in the customers, the data, the distribution, and the operational reliability around it.
“Software is no longer the moat. Processes, people, cash flow, brand, reliability, and operational scalability — that's where real value lives. The technology is the easy part now.”