1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
See jwz's struggles with hosting his own email. (Not linking to his blog here with HN as the referrer...)
With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.
So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.
I have a 15+ year old Gmail account that I've used everywhere. Spam has been a non issue since 15+ years ago.
The only Gmail accounts that are "overrun by spam" are those of people subscribing to lots of spammy newsletters and then not knowing how to unsubscribe from them (or figuring they'd stay subscribed in case the next newsletter is the Magical One™). But that's 100% self inflicted and you can't save those people with any technical solution.
Email spam isn't a day to day problem for Gmail (at least) since Bayesian email filtering was first implemented.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
Even if your "self hosting" is renting a $5/month VPS, some spam lists (e.g. UCEPROTECT) proactively mark any IP ranges owned by consumer ISPs and VPS hosting as potential spam. I figured paying fastmail $30/yr was worth never having to worry about it.
I had quite a bit of success with it and of course, DKIM and the other measures you can take some years back.
For personal emails, I don't think I had any which fed straight into spam.
e.g. you spend a lot of money to show that you are a legitimate entity or you pay less money to rent something that shows you are connected to said entity.
Without some kind of federation or centralization, it seems hard to distinguish a hobbyist from a spammer if both of them are using a plug-and-go. Forcing that responsibility into the hands of Google, Zoho, and Microsoft seems like the best compromise, unfortunately.
No amount of LLM usage is going to change them into full stack vibe coders who moonlight as sysadmins. I just don't see it happening.
Not until, that is, a new generation, that has grown accustomed to the tech, takes over.
Until then the current SMBs will for the most part fulfill their IT needs from SaaS businesses (of which I think there will be more due to LLMs lowering the barrier for those of us who feel confident in our coding and sysadmin skills already).
These are real risks to these companies.
Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.
I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous.
If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
I mean in an example that almost happened... "you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses, Adobe buys it, you are paying 500k per year in Figma licenses"
At least up until the point of vibe coding it was still worth the SaaS provider charging at least as much if not slightly more than you doing it yourself because most businesses weren't going to anyway.
If you need rich outputs, there are tools for that now too.
Let me put it another way - would you want to be Adobe or Figma right now?
And applied to the original point, would you feel comfortable being a SaaS company right now?
So you end up spending the money elsewhere? with exploratory design you can easily spend 10k a month on these models as a company of 1000, thus completely losing any monetary savings. Anyway you look at it, Saas worked because costs were spread out and low enough to not optimize it too much.
I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this.
Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
They are just hearing the promise that AI will allow them to build custom software that perfectly melds to their needs in no time at all, and think it sounds great.
I suspect the early adopters who go this route are going to be in for a rude awakening that AI hasn’t actually solved a lot of hard problems in custom software development.
Hunger or actually putting real investment against it? I'll wait.
Of course, once AGI is available (if it is ever) everything changes. But for now someone needs to have the deep expertise.
I cannot imagine an SMB or fortune 500 ripping out Salesforce or SAP. However, I can see a point-tool going away (e.g., those $50/mo contracts which do something tiny like connect one tool to another.)
That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs.
If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
It used to be that your new b2b product has to try and displace a spreadsheet. Now it has to displace an agent.
How is it in any way B2B? At most B2C + freelancers / individuals / really small SME.
It didn't have any clues a med/large B2B would look for e.g. SSO, SOC2 and other security measures. It doesn't target reusability that I as a B would want. The provided blocks never work together. There aren't reusable components.
Tailwind UI or now Tailwind Plus is more like vibe coding pre-AI.
B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.
I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.
Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.
I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.
If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
You get the same shocks with internal teams, just from other causes. And you have to manage them.
I'm sure you've only ever seen brilliant software created by internal software teams?
I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.
Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.
Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought
Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira
(this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?
This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.
I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.
Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...
This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools"
3. "Analysts are writing notes titled “No Reasons to Own” software stocks." - there is just one analyst saying this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stock...
4. Most of these SaaS tech stocks have been trading at all time highs...this smells of "explain something very complex with a simple anecdote"
EDIT: Oh lol, the author has a vibe coding SaaS offering...there ya go.
- If our customers vibe coded better integration points for us, it probably improves our overall value to our customers.
- The software industry, especially startups, is such an insignificant portion of the market, its not really worth worrying about. But, I can tell you from experience, that even large software companies don't want their own developers spending much time on accounting, ERP, or HRIS systems and they "outsource" this to SaaS companies.
Fav tips:
- Give the AI restraints, like “Don’t tell me to kill myself as part of this stir-fry recipe.”
- Fact-check any information provided by asking the follow-up question “Are you sure?”
- Offset your water footprint by not bathing for 72 hours after each use.
Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
So many takes on here are so lazy and simpleton that when you go a few levels deeper all the flaws get exposed.
you gotta treat communities like newspapers - acknowledge their bias and diversify
* writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes
* there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc.
* along the same line, some of those open source projects offer self-hosting and cloud version: I would always personally go for the cloud version because in a small team I don't want to operate something that other people built and I don't know how to operate. That's not my job not my team job
* people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software, which is something that goes beyond the adrenaline rush you get after "building" something with Lovable or similar tools. Also, I find it extremely easy to get 80% done quickly but excruciatingly slow to get things done right.
* I still see huge value in using tools like Lovable to build a working prototype and validate assumptions so that you get quickly build the right thing right solving the right problem in the right away avoiding waste
* camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible
* same can be said for other things like restaurants, where sometimes it's more convenient (although expensive) to buy vs build.
tiktok alone has 1.5 million directors! it's just that we call them creators now.
the meaning of the word director has changed, that's all. but professional roles shift in meaning all the time. a computer used to be a literal human doing arithmetic. an engineer was someone who designed war machinery. being a doctor used to mean teaching at an university.
human beings are natural tool makers. we always have been. the frontier material to manipulate where the most advanced engineering happens constantly changes: stone -> bronze -> iron -> ink (descartes) -> steel -> silicon -> javascript (YOU ARE HERE).
notice how each step is an improvement/abstraction on top of the steps that came before it. some say english is next in that chain. i honestly have no idea. all i know is there will always be The Next Thing and it'll be much nicer to work with.
Yep. Many SaaS have an edge because they factorize the struggle of many customers, if a SaaS has 1000 customers, each customer vibing their way into a home-built solution will require dedicated efforts at maintaining it. Even with AI, those efforts aren't negligible.
Many companies don't even operate any IT infrastructure, cloud or otherwise, themselves, beyond office connectivity, AI replacing SaaS will require someone in charge of that at the very least.
Let me provide some possible evidence against this: so many teams are desperate to rewrite their codebase but struggle to actually do so. And when they finally make the leap, it takes them 5x as long as they had hoped. Then sometimes the new code isn't even any easier than the old code.
I personally find writing code to be a huge time suck and I'm very happy that AI helps me save that time.
I don't see AI helping with this. From my experience, it seems like the opposite. It can help you write the code after you've deconstructed the problem yourself and know how to keep it in check.
It's business logic, edge cases and other small necessary details that accumulated over time which make the code 'messy'. Once you've integrated all those in the new system, it likely looks equally messy. And discovering and implementing all those extra requirements is probably what took you the longest.
Not to say this applies to all re-writes or that AI tools can't help the process
I've done rewrites, replatforms, a bunch of times. The actual programming is not the tricky part, but instead (1) picking apart the legacy system, understanding what to build, (2) orchestrating the work to shift transactions from service A to service B without breaking anything.
Teams and especially developers love to think they can skip that phase and just crack on with the programming, invariably what happens is the same as described above: intoxicating velocity followed by a hard stop when you realise you haven't solved problems (1) or (2) above
If that’s the case, then I should think business owners and office workers should be able to sort that out, lestwise on the “how to automate the boring stuff” front. That repetitive, boring, time consuming, error prone work. Incremental, least work for greatest impact.
The danger is they pull a 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter —level mistake. Or their solution suite grows to big to manage with mounting tech debt.
Also, if you’re software also required some custom domain hardware, then there’s your bottleneck for protectionist business practices.
* several companies require their tool to have several certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001 etc etc), how this will work with vibe coded tools?
> camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible
That’s exactly what happened. There are more filmmakers than ever now due to the accessibility of cheap cameras, then digital tools, including affordable HD cameras. Especially once the DSLR revolution took off circa 2011, which enabled budget-constrained aspiring filmmakers to use prime lens sets rather than fixed/built in zooms on cheap camcorders. With proper lighting they could actually make something look pretty damn cinematic. The entire industry has radically shifted in the last 15 years in particular due to these changes, but it started to shift around 2000 if I have to assign a particular year to it.
When you had to shoot on film stock, which was expensive and had a whole processing pipeline that one couldn’t reasonably do at home, there was a much thicker barrier to entry. You basically had to go to film school or get into the industry before you could start making your own stuff. Hell the Duplass brothers started out on crappy camcorders. Now? A smartphone, some cheap LED’s, a basic computer, you can really make something.
Do everyone has the capability to build a comprehensive set of features that we call a product to solve problems that people or business have in their life?
That’s why I’m always skeptical about measuring AI impact based solely on quantitative metrics.
When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them.
AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S.
Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc.
Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.
Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc.
The F in SharePoint stands for fast
Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great!
It's not about the product it's about the results.
A given company or enterprise does not have to vibe code all this, they just need to make the 10 features with the SLA they actually care about, directly driven off the systems they care about integrating with. And that new, tight, piece of software ends up being much more fit for purpose with full control of new features given to company deploying it. While this was always the case (buy vs build), AI changes the CapEx/OpEX for the build case.
I'm pretty sure every developer who has dealt with janky workflows in products like Jira has planned out their own version that fits like a glove, "if only I had more time".
In spite of this, Jira is bigger than ever.
AI will be used to do “excel better” more than “replace a managed, compliant, feature-rich-carefully-engineered, service”.
At the same time, I have no idea what the cost of LLMs usage will be in the future. So I'm working to ensure the architecture stays clean and maintainable for humans in case this kind of tooling becomes untenable.
Didn't seem to kill off the big SaaS players or even weaken them.
If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally.
Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.
Section 174 almost changed that, but was reversed last year.
https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/...
Failed/partial/expensive migrations is the name of the game with SaaS as well. Lock-in is the bottom line.
Migrations become much less scary when you truly own your data and can express it in any format you like. SaaS will keep sticking around, especially those that act like white-hat ransomware.
The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database.
I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an AI agent that can build me a custom version in a week?
So, we did exactly that. We used Claude and Cursor to "vibe-code" EZTest. A 100% open source, self hosted alternative that does 90% of what the expensive SaaS tools do, but with zero recurring fees and total data ownership.
The market is crashing because the "Application Layer" has been commoditized. If you can build and own your infrastructure for the cost of a few API calls, the era of renting basic software is over.
We aren't just building a tool; we're proving that the "SaaS Tax" is now optional.
If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.
Someone to host and manage your SLop-As-A-Serivce (SLAAS) for a price point in the middle.
That feels like a business.
(1) Business model: hosted software you pay monthly for (vs self-hosted/one-time purchase)
(2) "Glue" products: tools like Monday.com that primarily provide synergy between data sources and workflows
The article is really about (2) - and yes, those are vulnerable to vibe-coding. If your product's core value is "we connect X to Y and show you a dashboard," that's now a weekend project.
But there's a huge category of SaaS where the value is in the product itself, not the integration layer. Take Excalidraw - fits the SaaS model, but try vibe-coding a collaborative whiteboard with real-time sync, proper data persistence, conflict resolution, export formats, etc. The hard problems aren't "connect API A to API B."
Or PostHog - sure you could vibe-code some analytics tracking, but building reliable event ingestion at scale, session replay, feature flags with proper rollout controls? That's years of engineering.
The "vibecodeable" SaaS products were always somewhat commoditized - AI just accelerated the timeline. The ones solving genuinely hard technical problems seem a lot safer to me.
I have a strong feeling the future's going to look like this:
Company vibe codes to replace a SaaS.
Little do they know this creates a time bomb: fragile systems where fundamental architectural defects are papered over by humans who knew the underlying dynamics but didn't articulate them well enough during the initial "vibe-architecture," so they're forced to patching the "impedance mismatches" with data entry or with even more vibe coding.
Those humans are eventually laid off, because of course they are. Data quality rapidly deteriorates. Operational mishaps deteriorate relationships with human counterparties. Defects begin to cost thousands to millions.
Suddenly, there's demand: not for SaaS, but for actual service businesses. Consultancies that can parachute in, do actual domain-driven design, and un-vibe that code. They do have a stronger-than-ever pool of out-of-work engineers (many from the failed SaaS companies).
The SaaS companies that survive understand that the first S no longer stands for Software; it stands for Solutions.
it already is
just point Claude Code at a Claude Code codebase you forgot about for a few weeks with no plan.md or agents.md or memory.md implemented
configure the session correctly this time and put it in plan mode, it will deal with your whole database schemas, migrate, tie everything to the new models correctly, make a backend deployment script, and fix your UI/UX
Need it to one shot that report against your db using React/Typescript? Or pump out a web form that submits to your backend? works every time.
Need it to do something a little more creative? It frequently fails in subtle ways that aren't apparent until later.
That maybe doable in your 10-people startup, Namanyay. Try doing it in a larger organisation with layers upon layers of firewalls, databases, authentication systems and not the least importantly - management. Not to mention the vastly different audience, both in size and interest. Your own experience is not the experience of everyone else.
I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc.
Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direction and we're (https://www.definite.app/) trying to beat them to it.
Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus.
Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades.
This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management.
For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment.
I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.
The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road.
Lots of drudge work can be assisted by AI, especially if you need to do things like in ingest excel sheets or spit out reports, but I would run far away from anything vibe coded as hard as possible.
One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few fields to a csv output.
So the total cost of XXX is in the 2M/year range, and it keeps ballooning.
My (4 men) team already takes care of the entire warehouse management process except inventory, the only thing that XXX provides, we literally handle everything: picking, manufacturing, packaging, shipping phase and many others.
In any case, nobody has mentioned vibe coding.
I stated that a handful of good engineers with the aid of AI in a couple of months can provide a working prototype to evaluate. In our case it's about extending our software that already does everything, except inventory management.
When you spend 2M/year on a software (1% of your revenue), growing every year by 100/150k it makes sense to experiment building a solution in house.
Spending tons of money to get a janky, unreliable system of record, or finding out too late it is missing crucial auditing capabilities, or that it has Big Money bugs, on the other hand, is far worse, especially if you have investors asking what the hell you were thinking.
Your point about users not knowing what they wanted until after the fact is also painfully true. The hardest part about these systems is the people most likely to buy are the ones who have been doing it with a lot of human processes for years. Buying a SaaS or other third party product means having leverage to force them to change to more standard practices. Building in-house means that everyone will fight to high hell to make sure that their special snowflake way of doing things is accounted for and you end up in a worse spot as a result.
I rather use Excel. It's likely More robust and safer than the vibe coded app that could trigger data loss / incorrectness / issues any time.
I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".
For most companies this was always true, but LLMs have given them the confidence to actual start writing more software in house. The SAPs of the world have nothing to fear, companies aren't going to vibe code a CRM, but they are going to be able to more easily write integrations. At a previous job we frequently had bills for €10.000 for small integrations into our ERP, but once we figured out the API and gained more confidence in our abilities, all those integrations got pulled in house.
If your SaaS platform provides actual benefits, then you don't need to worry. If your business in writing integrations for other companies into platforms you don't own, yes, AI is going to hurt your business.
This should have happened regardless of AI though. The idea that companies (over a certain size, e.g. ~20 people) doesn't have a least on developer employed, regardless of industry always seemed like a missed business opportunity. We wrote so many tools for sales, warehousing, customer service and accounting and it's hard to imagine the business functioning without those tools. I might have spend two weeks writing a tool, but if it saves sales 20 hours a week punching in orders, we get a positive return in a month.
We contracted a lot of usage, and are using it literally like a S3 bucket with a malware scanner attached to it, and ignoring the dozens and dozens of document management capabilities it has - that we don't need. (Because really, we only ever needed a S3 bucket with a virus scanner...). This alone will allow us not to renew that contract, and save, maybe, around 2M per year.
Sure, we will have to have our own API that will require support and what not, but... we already HAD to have our own API that requires support and what not, since we have a bunch of legacy document management platforms running in various countries, and we anyway have to operate an abstraction and a router.
I am sure ours might not be the most typical case, but there will be savings, and since the economy is what it is, my bosses are telling me to go for every saving I can find, and thats one of them.
(I'd not try to re-write an ERP system, for instance, or a CRM. But a lot of smaller things where we pay a substantial premium? Sure - we will try.).
Simple CRUD app sure, but we're nowhere near being able to vibe code even a relatively low-complexity enterprise SaaS product.
If it's got customer data in it and/or you're making important business decisions based on it, you really need your system to be accurate and secure. My experience is the people who procure enterprise software know this and tend to care a lot about it. They often have legal and contractual obligations around that.
In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers.
And yet, precisely that happened in the end, just not with the tools envisioned. Excel, VBA and, where you had one knowledgeable employee, MS Access makes for incredibly powerful and incredibly hard to maintain "shadow IT" - and made even more difficult when someone sneaked in a password, because that takes a bit of an effort to remove [1], knowledge that is easy for us today to find, but not when I was young.
Also, back in the IE6 era, there was a lot of point-and-click created web interfaces... just that it wasn't HTML5 or even HTML. It was an <object> tag loading some ActiveX written by some intern in VB6, or Java, or Flash. I sort of miss that era but also, it was a damn security nightmare. Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits, but at least it didn't run native code with full user privileges by design. I'm not kidding, theoretically you could go and import/use functions from any system DLL up to and including Kernel32. OLE/OCX, ActiveX... a design way ahead of its time.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/removing-the-pass...
The new tools didn't shrink demand for COTS enterprise software - it grew massively since the 90s!
I do think like this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690) is a good example of where a custom more domain specific solution makes a lot more sense that dropping in an off-the-shelf ERP. Still though, I think the bakery would prefer to buy the bakery-ERP than build it but vibecoding does reduce the barrier to entry so we might see more competition and share taking from incumbents by domain-specialized new entrants.
It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.
Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.
Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.
Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.
If anything AI helps companies escape the "feature wheel" that is used to justify exorbitant costs, while providing debatable (and often even negative) utility to the end user.
Keep in mind, Excel '98 would still probably be overkill for 85% of people's needs in 2025.
What companies thought was adding more utility, was actually just continually stacking costs in front of getting to that core functionality.
AI replaces the core functionality, and the "feature" scheme collapses...
Also you're generalizing some things to the whole sector like every software provider now is useless and the new features they add are not bringing any values. How can you make such generic statements about a sector that is so diverse?
I start to suspect some of you are just private-equity-sponsored accounts trying to push Anthropic propaganda over the Internet.
Software will cease to be a winner take all and be a very long tail distribution!
You need to have tremendous agency/will to start competing with a public company. Plus, you need to have a lot of distribution channels, competing with sales people that do this for a living since ages, and marketing budgets that are higher than your annual Claude spending.
Regular people do not press 10 clicks daily to track their calories, and you're saying that they will start competing with Salesforce and the like?
Take a couple screenshots of your legacy app, write a short paragraph describing it, and the web tool will give you a self-contained HTML file that’s a fully interactive mock-up.
But it’s still a mock-up. So software dev in general will be fine, it will evolve. But unless the AI companies run out of money and it turns out the $20/mo plan actually costs $1000/mo without VC subsidies, Figma is cooked.
A lot of companies have been too smart for that, and a lot of SaaS offerings are too small to be truly entrenched. Arguably the investment horizon is too short (IBM took decades getting to that point).
The only real vendors who managed to become the next IBM are the cloud providers.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
My own prediction is that reliable vibecoding will be additive. It's a new capability that will help high-agency people do things faster or answer questions they couldn't easily answer before. Need to spin up a big custom Monte Carlo calculation and want a simple UI to control and configure it? You can just throw that together now. Need to get a draft budget allocation for a big set of projects calibrated against a set of conflicting constraints? Let an agent crank at it for a couple hours, then review and refine manually -- or just toss it out if you don't like it.
But building, running, and maintaining production-grade services or apps that the company relies on for its basic functioning? You're not just paying the SaaS vendor for having built the product -- you're paying them to maintain it, run it, and respond to issues promptly. You're also paying them to keep building it and improving it over time. To be clear, I think there are certainly cases where the rise of "coding AGI" is going to lead companies to build some services internally versus buying from a vendor, but I predict these will be highly custom and bespoke services that are too tailored for a specific corporation to make sense for a third-party vendor to try to sell.
Most companies are not going to replace stable SaaS with a pile of AI-generated internal tools. They don’t want the maintenance or the risk.
If there’s a real B2B game changer, it’s Microsoft.
The day Excel gets a serious, domain-aware AI that can actually model workflows, clean data, and automate logic properly, half of these “build vs buy” debates disappear. People will just solve problems where they already work.
Excel has always been the real business platform. AI will just double down on that, not kill SaaS.
Best they can do is more adware in windows. Sorry.
Are they not able to just engage AI to solve those problems now? E.g. this morning I saw an app that did something interesting to me for $20 a month. 20 minutes in Gemini and I had a functional app that replicated the behavior. SaaS are more complex but give me a small team and a couple months and we could replicate most any of them.
Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead.
One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.
What survives: products with proprietary data, strong network effects, or deep domain expertise baked into the workflow. The moat moves from "we built a UI" to "we understand this problem better than anyone."
I run 4 side projects and the ones getting traction aren't the ones with the fanciest AI features - they're the ones solving specific problems people have repeatedly (meal planning, meeting search). The AI is the engine, not the product.
The real risk for B2B SaaS isn't that AI replaces your product - it's that your customers can now build a "good enough" internal version in a weekend with Claude Code.
Thats the pitch.
But, what are Claude plugins?
Plugins=Commands+Skills+Integrations.
Commands are specific to Claude code. But commands and skills are nothing but prompts at their basest level.
So what is the main differentiator?
Integrations.
But what are you integrating with?
SaaS companies.
And what is the stock market doing?
Dumping SaaS stocks.
How do they think Claude cowork will work without the integrations. Without the system of records.
If anything, these SaaS products have become more important. If I was a trading guy, I would go to the github of claude plugins, see the default integrations and buy the stock of those companies.
There are many millions of companies that are going to be re-examining if they can do better in the next years. The work will still be very complicated but with the help of AI, small IT shops might just deliver enough value to be worth the trouble.
The notion of e.g. busy floor plant/logistics managers vibe coding this themselves is silly. 1) they don't have the time; these people are super busy 2) they lack the ability. 3) they'll want it done properly 4) their employers won't skip all the certifications, iso stuff, and what not.
Companies invest in SAAS software if it delivers some kind of revenue/profit benefits. If it's too expensive/complex, it can't do that. AI tools lower the cost of SAAS solutions. So the totally addressable market grows. Companies will want to maximize their ROI though. So, they'll do the usual and engage software companies and integrators to help them do this. They'll expect to pay less for more. And there will be lots of haggling around that topic. But there's an enormous amount of companies that are quite far behind on getting their operations into this century in terms of IT already. There are going to be early adopters looking for early successes here that will put pressure on their competitors if they are successful.
I'm running a small company in this space. We're seeing a lot of opportunities right now. And AI is making my work massively easier already. All those complex ERP integrations just became an order of magnitude easier to do with a small team. They are still hard though. Forget about vibe coding that. You need a plan.
Anecdata sample size of one, but this is not my experience at all. My business has only continued to grow over the past couple years, and I don't think I've had a single customer mention AI to me at all (over the phone or email).
For Salesforce-like CRM, there's Twenty[0], a good-enough alternative. For Shopify-style e-commerce, Medusa[1] is a headless commerce platform.
The real power comes from using AI to study how these projects implement specific features (payments, inventory, customer dashboards, etc.) and adapt them to your stack. AI excels at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and grasping the full implementation. The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces otherwise. That's what I'm building at opensource.builders[2]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook with structured "skills" that point to exact details for reliable remixing and porting.
SaaS companies are forever beholden to raising their market cap, even in solved spaces like cart, payment processing, and CRMs. Most businesses run on CRUD apps anyway, and if your core app exposes an API, you can build any customization you need on top of it. People here discounting how valuable it is for a business to have the software that runs their business on a tech stack they understand and something they truly own.
[0] https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty
Reading through the article:
> They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3
Couple things we needed to understand here:
- How large is the client company
- Is that $30,000/month or day or hour....
Any product/service that people care about comes with a pager rotation - which is 6-7 employees making > $200k/year. If you can offload that responsibility to a SaaS for < $1mmm/year - done deal.
There are many companies that operate like this all over the world. Outside of the hyper-growth tech VC world cutting costs is a very real target and given how cheap Devs are outside of America it's almost always worth it.
I can't imagine it would ever be worth, under any scenario, trying to write/build/support any $25/seat SaaS software for any company I've worked at in 25+ years.
Another thing to keep in mind - very little of the cost of a SaaS license is the time it takes to build the software. Security, Support, Maintenance, Administration, backups/restores, testing/auditing said backups/restores, etc, etc.. and then x-training new SREs on how to support/manage this software, ...
Even as someone who spend 10+ hours a day churning out endless LLM applications, products, architectures from my myriad of Cursor/Codex/CC interfaces and agents - I'm dubious that LLMs will ever eat into SaaS revenue.
I'm sure (lots of) people will try - and then 1-2 years in someone will look at the pain, and just pull the ripcord.
I didn't read any more of the article after that, and the primary reason was just this weird font choice.
In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.
Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.
Yes, a lot.
> Who's taking care of it?
It's not hard.
We wouldn't do it for tools that are purpose made and have sane pricing in the market place. We do it for stuff that would traditionally go on a 'platform' like Salesforce or something that requires a lot of customization to begin with. It's so much easier to just roll your own than even just going through the procurement process of those kinds of tools much less the integration and change process (hiring consultants, etc). I'm not hands on with it, but I know our small group of AI are helping us eliminate $5m recurring annual spend this year and that's directly impacting the topic article. I won't be surprised if at some point we replace our more sticky ERP software or use this leverage to negotiate prices that are sane. Businesses have been gouged by enterprise software long enough.
No names, but my company is service companies (mostly residential) - many logos with different verticals (think electric, hvac, etc). Having a SaaS CRM that served all our brands needs was always a challenge and made aggregating anything difficult (we basically were running multiple CRMs)
We were using dozens of SaaS tools per logo - and just going through them all and figuring out what features we need/want and rolling them into the larger system. We've also built handful of things for internal operations, finance, etc
Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does the internal dev really want to deal with the care and feeding of the random shitty timesheet app they created?
Do they want to take on the work of integrating random backend systems that timesheet system needs to talk to? Do they want to get called at 3AM when it's down?
Even AI assisted, living year after year with production systems is hard.
They want AI to vibecode a rolodex. And just use that. For 30 years if needed. 2000 LOC and a one time $20 cost.
The cancer of SaaS cannot die fast enough.
"According to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey from June 2025, 45% of all organizations and 56% of “digital natives” cited data sovereignty and potential cloud changes as their greatest concern for 2026."
https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-3...
That is because AI is living in our world, instead of the opposite where we live in AI's world.
Case in point: maybe the AI hallucinated a class method that never existed in our world yet, but perhaps in the AI led processes and workflows it would be written to better fit into the smooth gradient decent those same top parameters' scores.
The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.
As expensive as some of these software seem in terms of cost per seat, most of the subscription contract rarely exceed a few hundred thousand / year if even $1mm, which is drop in a bucket for many companies. (vs running on-prem servers, having staff to support them)
You'd think Atlassian would be printing money given everybody under the sun is using them, but they only make $5B in annual revenue.
I've worked at fortune 50 companies for a while and custom enterprise software is still alive and well for things that are too business specific to buy off the product for. But they're not going to be in a rush to create their own Workday, Salesforce, Jira, Figma, SAP, etc.
Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform.
I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version.
These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.
I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher.
(Insert rant from dev teams about the code sucks, who will maintain it, etc). Yes all valid points, but things are changing regardless of if folks like it or not.
- Hey Claude, what is the project in XXXXX/ about and how does it work ? What should be improved there ?
$opencode
/init
Wait 20 second, then describe the bug.
AGENTS.md seems to exist not just to save tokens, but also so the Bus has to do overtime Isekaing people before a company goes down.
Probably one way SaaS companies will adapt is to break up their offerings into more modular low cost components. While many customers will end up paying less, the addressable market will probably increase because of the new low cost options.
To a degree but most enterprise focused software usually has differential pricing. Often that pricing isn't public so different companies get different quotes.
What's changing is that agents + APIs are becoming a better delivery mechanism for many workflows than a UI you manually operate. A company paying $50k/year for a marketing analytics dashboard doesn't actually want a dashboard — they want answers about what's working. An LLM with API access to their data sources often delivers that faster than navigating someone else's opinionated interface.
The SaaS most at risk isn't infrastructure (Stripe, Twilio) or systems of record (Salesforce, Workday). It's the 'pretty UI on top of data you already own' tier — analytics, reporting, simple automation, basic CRM. That's where the compression happens. The products that survive will be the ones that become the system of record, or that offer value AI genuinely can't replicate (regulatory compliance, deep integrations with legacy systems, etc).
Most people who've been in a business SaaS environment know that writing the software is relatively the easy part aside from in very difficult technical domains. The sales cycle + renewals and solution engineering for businesses is the majority of the work, and that's going nowhere.
Which is easier to vibecode - AI agent or Salesforce?
The fragmentation in the AI agent space will be markedly larger than at the base CRM layer.
Abd the AI agent is replaceable in under a minute but your data in Salesforce isn’t.
Hopefully wannabe senior leadership will try and take advantage of AI without taking advantage of developers, because most of us just want to write code and build something great.
Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it. CEOs of companies that train and offer LLMs, Authors of Books about LLMs and AI in general, etc.
This may come off as an unpopular opinion, but this is how I felt after listening to Steve Yegge recently. He has a new book about Vibe coding and he goes on in the interview/podcast to say that the best programmers he knows in the world (the ones better than him and maybe even the top world class programmers), would be equivalent to those of interns in an year, if they don't start vibe coding or use AI. I respect the guy, but damn, this is just peak delusion. He didn't even say it as a hyperbole, he meant it.
According to popular CEOs of companies training LLMs, 2024 was supposed to be the year that would eliminate the need for Junior and mid-level engineers. 2025 happened. Now, we are in 2026.
So yeah, I'm never taking advice about AI from these people ever again.
I get where you're coming from, but let's say you're talking to a HVAC installer, and he recommends you a system to get - I'm sure there's financial self-interest on his part, but I do like to think that he knows quite a bit about what he does, and believes what he's selling is genuinely good stuff (and has reason to), even if he oversells it a bit.
The difference is, in other sectors, there's no fear-mongering. If you don't use their HVAC, it's fine. Your job isn't getting replaced. The air you breathe in your home isn't going to be fully polluted. You have other options.
With AI though, there's no middle ground. You either use their tool and become extremely successful (so much that you don't know what to do with that much success) or you're out of a job and become obsolete in like the next 3 seconds.
People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later.
I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just like how many less people smoke today than in the past, the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point someone will figure out how to replace SaS with AI; it's just going to take a lot longer than many think.
The system of record bit is quite correct and imo the only durable advantage. But that doesnt explain why Klaviyo shoyld worry. In fact marketing workflows are some of the most important systems of record directly tied to business earnings.
The assumtpion that in SaaS you build once and everybody uses it is false. There are always customizations or features that need to be built for big contracts. Its the small players that are okay with out of the box SaaS since they lack the budget to pay for a customization. Ironically, these teams will get hurt the most should they choose to go down the vibe code everything path. Here infra capex is far lower than payroll and owning too much software (vibe coded or not) will simply steal time from business development.
Honestly, the market just panicked and caused a temporary correction thats all. Then we all got busy and wrote a bunch of thought leadership crap on top.
In reality AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS companies since it reduces RnD time and expenses, allows even small players to bid for large contracts without overloading existing dev capacity and also makes it possible to put devs in front of customers since now there's no need to sit down and code. AI is also the best thing to happen to engineering since it now allows for product management to be folded into the existing craft.
but around the point "2. Security, authentication, and robustness" the LLM took over and finished it...
Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.
But, not sure which successful SaaS companies just stopped shipping any updates to the product, never talked to their customers and never added any new features to win over major new accounts - and still managed to survive and thrive?
And the author actually confirms this:
> AI isn’t killing B2B SaaS. It’s killing B2B SaaS that refuses to evolve.
And all of those updates are just AI features.
Can you though? With major bugs? We've been getting more and more crashes, downtime, issues etc lately and a lot of it has had to do with vibe coding.
The whole point of these B2B SaaS is meant to be quality.
i.e. it's set users' expectations but in the wrong way.
How's that going for Microsoft?
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/2025-has...
- A company vibe codes their own app to replace a SaaS. Great when they only wanted a small chunk of the functionality. - Startups benefitting from AI coding are copying mature SaaS companies and competing on price. - Mature SaaS companies are branching out into each others domains. Notion is doing email. Canva is doing an office suite.
The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.
1. Too big to fail (SalesForce, ServiceNow, ServiceTitan, Shopify). They’re targeting megacorps’ core business operations. Switching costs are too high. They will survive,
2. B2B non-core (PagerDuty, Vanta, Monday, Atlassian). They’re going to have stiff competition and most here will fail or merge/consolidate. They have the most to lose because they’re non-core to a business’s success and pricing pressures will cause many of them will be easily vibecoded with enough time. The large TAM here will attract hundreds of competitors each.
3. Consumer SaaS (Notion, Canva, Grammarly, Dribbble). They're good as dead and can be buried.
Imagine this, you are VP of finance. You know you can get a nice tax calculator built quickly using vibe coding, but will you put your neck on the line and say, let's replace the existing vendor and use my vibe coded tool. You might fired if you send a wrong tax report to your auditor.
Let's take another example - VP of sales wants performance report and visuazliation of the sales team. He has 200 BDRs. The daily sales standup depends on this report, team gets yelled at or praised basis this. Now, will this VP be willing to put his neck on the line and say - let's use my vibe coded report and discard the existing SaaS. Even if such a report feels trivial, it is vital for functioning the sales team and hence, it needs to be reliable.
I think vibe coding will work at prototype level - the trust gap is very huge right now to even consider it for internal tools.
And, until vibe coded tools are stress tested enough this trust gap will not be fulfilled. Think about this, why some of the biggest companies in the world still run on softwares built in 2000s.
then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out
of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again
you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders
in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything
but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.
A middle 100-500 heads firm don't need enterprise level SaaS, a vibe coded website will suit them better.
Fundamentally, those workflow/orchestration SaaS needs to answer the question why people should pay you premium while only getting 80% where they want to be.
At the level of the old adage about whether the horse-drawn buggy-makers are in the buggy business or the transportation business, it's all telling the computer what to do in the context of providing a customized tool that you or others might use. So in this context, a customized Excel spreadsheet counts. And so does a vibe-coded app.
And of course, wringing our hands about what it looks like now totally ignores the fact that it's not going to be like this for more than a year or two at most.
How long until a user can reasonably say to Claude or similar, "I need Bob here to track production at my factory. Lay out a set of tools to do that, and make sure they're layered with help and tutorials so Bob can learn on the job because he doesn't know anything. Don't let him make any mistakes."
That's probably not coming next year, but certainly it's not ten years away.
Unless you consider customer acquisition cost. Not considering cost of sales is one of the big mistakes software developer entrepreneurs make.
B2B SaaS is projected to grow over the next decade, not shrink. Just use the LLMs and you’ll be reminded of the value provided by the company selling non-core but important tools for your business.
I've never seen a SaaS product that fits this description. There are always things to do. Libraries to upgrade, performance bottlenecks to diddle around with, an endless stream of nonsense feature requests from people at the customer who never actually use the product, fun experiments your developers want to try out, and so on.
The hard part in SaaS is to delete code, and that's what you should do, at least some of the time. Either through simplifications, or just outright erasing functionality that very few if any of your customers rely on.
What you should not do is let your customers grow the liability that is code in your production environment, unless your entire product set is designed to handle things like this, e.g. the business models of Salesforce and SAP.
1) The must-haves. These are your email and communication systems, the things you absolutely have to have up and available at all times to do business. While previously self-hosted (Exchange/Sendmail, IRC/Skype/Jabber, CallManager/UCS), the immense costs and complexities of managing systems ultimately built on archaic, monolithic, and otherwise difficult-to-scale technologies meant that SaaS made sense from a cost and a technical perspective. Let's face it, the fact nobody really hosts their own e-mail anymore in favor of Proton/Microsoft/Google/et al shows that self-hosting is the exception here, not the norm - and they're not going anywhere regardless of how bad the economy gets. These are the "housing stock" of business, and there's plenty of cheap stock always available to setup shop in without the need for technical talent.
2) The juggernauts. The, "we can do this ourselves, but the pain will be so immense that we really don't want to". This is the area where early SaaS solutions cornered and exploded in growth (O365, ServiceNow, Google Workspaces), because managing these things yourself - while feasible, even preferable - was just too cheap to pass up having someone else wrangle on your behalf with a reasonable SLA, freeing up your tech talent for all the other stuff. The problem is that once-focused products have become huge behemoths of complex features that most customers neither need nor use on a regular basis, at least after the initial pricey integration. Add in the ease of maintainability and scalability brought by containers or microservices, along with the availability and reliability of public cloud infrastructure, and suddenly there's more businesses re-evaluating their relationships with these products in the face of ever-rising prices. With AI tooling making data exfiltration and integration easier than ever from these sorts of products, I expect businesses to start consolidating into a single source of truth instead of using dozens of specific product suites - but not toppling any outright.
3) The nice-to-haves. The Figmas, the HubSpots, the myriad of niche-function-high-cost SaaS companies out there making up the bulk of the market. Those whose products lack self-hosted alternatives risk having vibe-coded alternatives be "good enough" for an Enterprise looking to slash costs without regard to long-term support or quality; those who compete with self-hosted alternatives are almost certainly cooked, to varying degrees. If AI tooling can crank out content similar in quality to Figma and the company has tech talent to refine it for long-term use, why bother paying for Figma? If AI tooling can crank out a CRUD UI for users that just executes standard REST API calls behind the scenes, then why bother paying for fancy frontends? While it's technically interesting and novel at how these startups solved issues around scaling, or databases, or tenancy, the reality is that a lot of these niche products or services could be handled in-house with a container manager, a Postgres instance, and a mid-level IT person to poke it when things go pear-shaped. The higher per-seat prices of a lot of these services make them ripe for replacement in businesses comfortable with leveraging AI for building solutions, and I expect that number to grow as the tools become more widely available and IT-friendly in terms of security.
Ultimately, the core promise of SaaS to business customers was all the functionality with none of the costs of self-hosting support. Nowadays, many of them have evolved into solutions that are more expensive than self-hosted options, and businesses that have shifted IT into public clouds or container-based systems have realized they can do the same thing for less themselves, at the cost of some UI/UX niceties in the process. Now that we (IT) can crank out integrations with local LLMs with little to no cost, we're finally able to merge datasets into singular pools or services - and I'm not talking about Snowflake or its "big data" ilk so much as just finally getting everything into Salesforce or ServiceNow without having to bring in consultants.
The must-haves and many of the juggernauts will remain - for now. It's the niche players that need to watch their moats.
If software is cheaper... building it seems a much better option but... ...the fact that software is cheaper means that SaaS companies will be able to be more competitive with price, offering more features, integrating them much better with the newest agentic tools and frameworks that are getting released.
Sure, the market will adjust, some will be pushed away, others will find businesses that weren't possible before... but we're far away (I hope) from the AGI revolution, don't forget to see this crysis as an opportunity too.
Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI.
I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet!
Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"
Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’
You need your B2B SaaS to think you can use AI to replace it though, so said SaaS will keep it's prices reasonable. Otherwise they have you by the balls and will charge you much as humanly possible.
You mean the poor SaaS company actually now has to implement features needed by customers??
Jesus wept.
If anything B2B SaaS is growing with AI, and it hasn't even begun, the biggest AI markets right now are personal. The B2B market is up for grabs for sure, 0%-1% of niches have an LLM product right now. But traditional SaaS has a huge advantage, they have reams of industry specific data, and they have the customers, sure they will have competition, but they are the incumbents.
If I had any money I'd buy the dip
- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.
- Professional scoffed at it as a toy
- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.
The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.
and u end up in aggregators aggregated aggregators type situation where optimal solutions never arise because we don't actually cooperate enough to produce them
ai is fitting into the notion that this is all bullshit ... even if not in the correct way
When enterprises/businesses in general upgrade any software in the company it takes years sometimes... There is also Vendor lock in, you can't just swap things with vibe-coded slop, and trust me your manager will never want to do that either because his butt will be on the line.
At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board.
We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing).
Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages.
So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No.
It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal.
Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case.
So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor.
But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of.
So we sat down and built https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/
It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works.
And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators.
We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp
First of all, many big companies pay a fortune to use inferior SaaS solutions instead superior Open Source solutions; possibly because one of their CTO may have received kickbacks or promises of a lucrative job at the SaaS provider as a consequence of this deal. There are a lot of politics going on behind the scenes when it comes to procurement.
Execs at big corporations are often looking for plausible ways to spend investors' money in a way that they can capture some of it for themselves. If they choose open source or they choose cheap vibe coded solutions; there is not much money changing hands. No opportunities for insiders to covertly monetize.
And then there are a lot of security implications to using a complex vibe coded app. The AI won't be able to identify the vulnerability in any decent sized codebase unless you know what you want it to look for.
If your workforce is vibing all day, they will have no capacity for maintenance, because it isn't their code. So the maintenance that happens will be slop and more spaghetti. I am not saying cases like that never existed before, but such companies will face a moment of truth sooner or later.
Now with cloud maturity and Vibe coders who will get better and cheaper, I think it's possible to replace all the features we use on Salesforce at a fraction of the cost of our Salesforce licensing cost.
You can shit out an app with AI, just like you could with Indian workers. But that doesn’t mean it will work properly or that you’ll be able to maintain it.
And most importantly, it only works for code they could steal from GitHub. It has no idea how to replicate sensitive systems which aren’t publically documented, and those are some of the most valuable contracts.
Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?
I was surprised when I saw the numbers from Bloomberg myself as well!
Saas will have to drop prices to be competitive so fat margins will go away which will probably affect margins for AWS etc.
As an anecdote, I've been vibe coding an accounting system that perfectly matches with my own expectations of accounting software, i.e., it's intimately connected to CSVs, imports and exports from CSVs, but acts as a kind of enrichment and reporting and file association layer. If there was anything like this, any kind of SaaS that I could have and download as software and run on my own computer offline and be able to inspect and trust and version control so they wouldn't add or remove some kind of feature that I wanted down the line, then I would have gone with that.
But now I have essentially my absolute ideal solution, written with a Python backend and Vue and JavaScript frontend, and it's radically improved my ability to maintain accounting for our business account.
And I think there's something really important to point out here, which is that the feeling of lock-in is very seriously reduced when you are Vibe coding your own software, because if you don't like the way that it works or you realize that there's something missing, you can add it pretty painlessly. Like, that's always been a huge challenge with choosing vendors for a SaaS platform, is you think, oh no, well, what if their conceptual model for what I'm trying to do doesn't quite map onto our own internal systems or understanding of what's being done? Well, when you have your own Vibe-coded SaaS, you can just add that information. So there's something incredibly organic about it. I used to work at a startup in Redmond where we built this large internal system to manage a scientific process with lots of machinery and data, and it was incredibly empowering and actually became one of the core values of the business that was able to be licensed to other businesses in the same industry. And it seems like we're just improving that capacity from here.
Now obviously, if Vibe Coding magically were to go away or became much more expensive, then I'd have this legacy piece of software, which I couldn't improve, and that would be a dead end. But my expectation is that the functionality that we have today will only improve. And in several years, the scope of changes that I'll be able to make, the level of professionalism, modularization, maintainability, code quality, will only improve. And so this has me thinking in general that software is kind of undergoing a step change where we're moving into the so-called age of intent beyond the age of the interface. And that's tremendously exciting to me, and I just couldn't be more stoked about it.
Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.
Although the article may also be hyperbolic, I'm not going to comment on reasons why it might be. Instead, I will agree, and think SaaS companies stock performance this year will be proof. Sure, it might not be the collapse that AI doomers are hoping for, but all the FUD they spread over the past few months to years will signal that they're not insulated from it. They made their cake, now they have to eat it too.
> And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach.
Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s
??? Do you mean biased or do you mean impartial?
I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.
So I quit and found a better job. Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.
(In before “prime example of overconfidence!”: feel free to doubt. It was a CRUD app with a handful of models on a PostgreSQL backend. They were writing a new Python web framework to serve it, complete with their own ORM and forms library and validation library. Not because the existing ones wouldn’t work, mind you, but more out of not realizing that all these problems were already sufficiently solved for their requirements.)
1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress).
2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).
The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior.
If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position.
Galileo Galilei handled this really well. When he discovered the moons of Jupiter he strategically named them after the ruling Medici family.
By making the discovery about their greatness rather than his own intellect, he secured their lifelong patronage.
However, if your superior is a "fading star" or is clearly about to fall, you do not need to be merciful. In these cases, it may be strategic to outshine them to hasten their downfall and position yourself as the natural successor.
If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.
Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.
Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.
The basic social skill is to avoid conflict and seek acceptance. Go along to get along.
One wouldn’t rewrite the app on one’s on recognizance without peer approval first if this is your vibe.
"Look how clever we were to hire this person and put them in the right place at the right time! We are now ahead of schedule and are reallocating teams."
There's remarkably little competent management.
Errr… Galileo was asked to write a book discussing both sides of the heliocentric / geocentric debate … and so wrote a book with two characters having a debate while walking in a garden - one named (I paraphrase for effect) “Galileo” and one named “Pope Simplehead”
Needless to say the next twenty years under house arrest gave him a lot of time to think about character names :-)
The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.
"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.
That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.
There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.
But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.
So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.
A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.
Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.
So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!
And on the other hand, the complexifier (you know the type) ships rude goldberg gizmos just waiting to go off-kilter - and then they come in and save the day - and get rewarded. This creates a very strong "emperor has no clothes" syndrome until reality hits the organization really hard in the face. More often than not these horrible solutions are "good enough" and the show just goes on.
Don't take it too seriously! That's what people are like!
Or that reaction is really "that looked simple, easy and like the last 10 "elegant solutions" that caused fires".
I didn't hang around that place long.
Basically build vs buy. The problem is on the 'buy' portion of looking at things the company failed. So they took who they had on hand and built something. It took a fresh perspective to say 'hey have you tried this' and looks like they did not want to hear it. I would say the right choice was made to move on.
This is wildly common. At that point they were committed to the wrong path at 'above my pay grade levels'. Once you get that buy in you better do it that way. Most companies will not pivot unless the champion for whatever is going on is removed in some way.
At 'my paygrade' I can prototype tech but I better make a good case why I need everyone else to do it too. If I dont I will be summerly ignored at best, at worst 'the guy with the lets rewrite the system hahahaha' guy. I might even be right about it. But the probelm is a jr level guy is not going to have the political cover to make it happen. Even if they are right.
But if you can get 'the higher ups' to buy in. Then it is quite dramatic how much better somethings putting that sort of tech in. Then other times it can be a total disaster. So you have to pick your hill to die on.
It sounds like pure junior dev fantasy that anyone would care beyond whether it meets the explicitly stated requirements.
Any other flourishes that the devs add are going to be unused or ignored, and that definitely includes what the devs think about their own work.
3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained them the situation and all we wanted from them was some GCP offering that would cure our woes and one that would cut our bills. The senior consultant - and presumably the only tech guy (rest seemed to be salesy) wasted our time like a used car salesman - he didn't even understand Google's own product portfolio and recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.
My boss and I left the meeting pissed off and he told me - "Neya, you probably know more about the product portfolio than these guys. Let's leave". That weekend, I went with my tried and trusted favorite Db - PostgreSQL - CloudSQL with a custom Elixir middleware based an old CMS I wrote a decade ago. After some trial and error, the solution worked flawlessly (and still does till date on auto-pilot). My client still has the lowest cost in the region - 1/3rd the cost of their competitors...7 years later. Back then, there was no vibe-coding, no AI, no auto-completion. Just pure thinking and experimentation.
All this just to say I agree that the new guy sometimes can make the best solutions to a problem and not always screw up. I always listen to new hires these days (now I'm a fractional / CTO) because you never know who could pull off that 1/3rd cost cutting framework move.
Sometimes those complex solutions are the right tool for the job. And other times, you just need to glue some stuff together, call it good, and start making money.
Experience helps a good engineer know when each approach is appropriate.
This video by Sasa Juric is still the gold standard (imo) of Elixir demos for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE
Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.
Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.
I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.
Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not.
In this case, I’d also watched this all take shape over a couple of months. Being the new person, I assumed it was some necessarily complex beast that was beyond my scrappy experience and calling for Serious Engineering. Once I recognized it for what it was, I knocked out my weekend project shortly afterward because I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as anything, I had the need to see if it really was as straightforward as I thought it could be. I didn’t sit on my idea for months while they toiled. I watched them toil for months before I understood the core of what they were making.
I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered…
It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.
Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.
That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.
Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.
When salesforce leaks your customer's information, whoopsie! not our fault! it's salesforce!
And yet they're far more likely to have the leak. BASICALLY.
I don't get it.
On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.
Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.
If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.
Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.
Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.”
I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.
Some people like building things, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time.
Some people like meeting other people and making money, etc, etc.
Know thyself.
Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.
The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.
It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.
Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.
Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.
In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job.
In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete and so on.
This over the weekend never works in the long run. The ORM worked for all the happy path and written down cases but then you have cases were the ORM just is not good enough or fast. So you start to add strange code to work around the ORM. The same for the web framework or the validation lib.
To me the author of this comment sounds like the typical "Freelancer" coming in into a company knowing everything better then all the people and then leaving after a few months and now everybody else has to deal with his code.
Turns out it's a lot easier to build on top of a common framework than do everything from scratch.
Its something different coming in and changing things here and there but rewriting the hole thing on a weekend is something different.
Would love an excuse to use it, but one has not come up in like 15 years since, hah.
We only know what OP wrote and he doesn't sell himself as a genius but as someone who was competing with really, really bad ideas.
I don't intentionally make my work hard for anyone else to maintain. I comment and write tests pretty thoroughly in case someone else comes along. Or in case I get woken up at 6am with a bad hangover.
It has its edge cases, but Alchemy is the greatest thing in the world when you need its exact features.
But yes, I’ve used that line plenty of times: “we’re not in the X-writing business”. I mean, sometimes you can’t help it, but those should be exceedingly rare cases.
But I don't think Claude Code is going to prevent an org that thinks they can prompt their way to a replacement for all their SaaS from having internal political bickering that makes them end up with a extra-shitty mega-compromise to try to make all the internal stakeholders happy.
If you've got no vision and no taste, you need to find a vendor who will protect you from screwing up your internal processes and tools.
Internal tools teams have rarely cared much about UX or the day-to-day experience of their poor users. The quick-and-dirty internal-prompt-based one is likely to similarly be unimaginative and unintuitive.
Fortunately it was limited to a small isolated service but I can imagine the damage on the long term if you continue that route on what becomes a huge monolith after a few years.
Maybe it's just something that happens to many in web development world, not-invented-here and all...
I don't doubt you at all.
I once worked on a project that was a new sign-up process for a large retailer (~90k employees at the time, four figures worth of outlets, quite a few billions in turnover).
There were about 60 people across, I can't even remember, maybe 10 teams that I knew about. One of the managers there assured me that the true participant figure was closer to 160. I was agog.
This project took months, and it had been going for months before I joined. And, as you can imagine, with that many people involved over that sort of timescale, there was turnover: people, sometimes key people, would leave and be replaced - sometimes by others who'd already worked on the project, but sometimes by new people - with the expected disruption that causes.
It was two web pages, plus some back end plumbing across multiple systems.
But, in the grand scheme of things, nothing that complex. I reckon it was a handful of thousands lines of code total across the full stack. I was mostly on the database side and, IIRC, I wrote a few hundred lines of SQL in a couple of stored procedures (wouldn't have been my preferred solution building from scracth but, you know, we weren't, and we had to integrate with a legacy systems that had to keep working as expected).
Overall it took 8 or 9 months from kick off to shipping and I was involved for perhaps 3 months of that towards the end. I was on the call with dozens of other people whilst me and one of the other guys hooked the final pieces together and tested it end to end for the first time... and it worked. There was actual cheering.
Large enterprises are genuinely ridiculous.
Big corpo may be too big to fail, not so sure about their whole cohort of partners and fakers.
In 99.9% of cases what seems to be "the better" version is better only for the "new guy" or rather his ego.
Those 47 teams hampering doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, and more often than not actually well justified "stamps".
You only understand those things when you turn from the "supergenius" into an owner who have to take care not only of numbers on screen, but also security, interfacing, management and so on.
Or you don't turn into.
The examples are legion, and they always seem to have NIH and baroque requirements, and be rather over- than underspecified. I would go so far as to say that these projects are almost never successful (and definitely never on time and budget).
Like I said earlier, it’s ok not to believe me. I don’t particularly mind. But just between us, my solution met every one of the project requirements using COTS parts because they’d made it waaayyyy harder than it needed to me.
I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.
Absolutely. But this begs the question that businesses want to also sign up to maintain whatever product they've built, on top of their core business.
"Service" is the word that people seem to be forgetting in SaaS. If you roll you own, all you have is software.
But yes, this brings us back to the point that simply building the tool is only a small part of the process...and it has often been one of the most expensive parts of the process.
What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?
In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.
I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.
This is true when you had to work hard for those ideas. Now you have LLMs. It means more people can sling a lot more crap at walls with fewer barriers to entry.
AI is like sugar. It tastes nice, gives you energy quickly - what's not to like? The gratification is immediate, and if "today is all that matters" it's brilliant.
The problem with sugar (and AI) is medium term. So sure, that junior dev whipped up the whole framework in ClaudeCode, and it's humming nicely. Junior dev gets credit, and after a couple years moves on somewhere else.
Then something changes. Windows. TLS. Code Signing, whatever. We need to update the program to the change. Just a small tweak. Junior Dev has gone (or is otherwise occupied) so we'll get new-Junior-dev to do it. Is he expected to do the change at the code level? Or at the prompt level? Will ClaudeCode in 2029 be able to maintain ClaudeCode Code from 2026? Or will it want to rewrite everything? Will new-junior-dev have the skillset to prompt as well as first-junior-dev? Was the code good enough that a dev could just "take it over"? Or was it "it works, let's use it" standard?
AI makes everyone look good in the short term. But it worries me for what happens in 5 years, 10 years, and so on. Sugar is great, but you can't live (long term) on sugar. Sometimes you need a proper meal plan.
- nearly every enterprise IT project is a failure anyway
- "can i do this for free?" savvy people write "thing i don't want to pay for github".
- ??? "stupid smelly nerds!" (https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4)
okay, what was the actual obstacle? it's really simple: in order to use something FREE, you had to touch GITHUB, which meant GIT. and people hate git.
today, with LLMs:
- "can i do this for free?"
- LLM dutifully does the needful, using projects it finds and code it learned from github, and doing the prosaic tasks of launching them for you, whatever that means.
people are getting way up into their heads about what matters, psychosocial and management and whatever bs. chatgpt is FREE. it will fix your problems for FREE. people will put up with ANYTHING for FREE.
the real innovation is laundering all that inaccessible, pre-existing solution space into a format that doesn't require transiting git and giving it away for free.
don't believe me? all of the most profitable SaaS businesses in technology are the packaging, deployment and customization of pre-existing open source free software, whether it is linux, kvm, postgres, etc. they are factories to turn stuff that is inaccessible because it is in GIT, which SUCKS - that is the hard part for people to wrap their minds around, that GIT sucks - into websites you can pay for. now LLMs do that.
You will trade initial development budget for advertising budget, trying to position your product in proximity with people who are known quantities.
It’s not about some single dude disrupting the saas market. It’s about largish companies who already have internal dev teams, slowly weening their company off these ginormous one size fits all saas products and building local, tailored solutions.
It’s death by a thousand cuts from the erosion of their highest paying customers.
Let’s put the cost of code production at 0: regulatory compliance with payment processing laws or industry oversight is a recurring job that’s common for the whole industry when it changes. SaaS companies have hundreds of customers to attend, these become first class business functions. New demands won’t be in training data for LLMs, so someone needs to be doing this. SaaS has the funds and customer base to have dedicated experts at these functions, but it’s dead capital and nigh-impossible hiring in a tiny talent pool for the rest of the market… the delta to get Salesforce or SharePoint not to be total ass and fully customized is orders of magnitude smaller than detailing those foundations, and as people who sharecrop on platforms like those know, the devil is always in the details. Those internal teams just aren’t positioned to juggle both sides of that coin, they can’t be experts, mistakes can be existential, and the liability picture is so very ugly… coding is the least of it.
Into this, MBAs are not static. It’s not gonna take more than a few “vibe coding ate our CRM data” high profile snafus, or industry think pieces to map out why customization is faster/better/smarter, to get clear business dogma around this. A witty turn of phrase about focusing on your actual business.
I think ‘no one ever got fired for hiring IBM’ x 5 is on the horizon, and the evil marketers at Salesforce, MS, and the rest are gonna work hard to grow their piece of the pie. They have LLMs too, only with better models and unlimited tokens. And our executives will be checking directly with their LLMs about how to invest (the consultants, journalists, fanboys, and social media bots too…).
Unrelated to the convo you make some very valid points. I just absolutely detest that saying xD
I’d bet that we skip SaaS entirely and go to Anthropic directly. This means the ai has to understand that there are different users with conflicting requirements and that we all need the same exact copy of the burn rate report.
That might turn out to be less than reliable over time, as bots are already screwing up systems with fake information and it's probably going to get worse.
If I remember my econ class correctly it uses used cars as an example. If you're neighbor bought a used Toyota and tells you about it being a great purchase, you can't go out and buy another used Toyota and expect it to also be in great condition. Every car is a gamble.
But if you use something like Hubspot and tell your neighbor it's really good/bad you can expect to receive the same Hubspot service they did.
A CTOs job isn't to save money but to spend money effectively. Saving money by increasing risk is not neccesarily a prudent move.
$40/head/year (including employees no longer with company) for a call metrics suite is low-stakes and relatively easy to replace what we want out of it, and this is an example of something we did replace with a $0 solution with my own abysmal-at-the-time coding skills. ~nobody's about to replace Microsoft suite, though (a couple replacements before me, they earnestly tried; there were still some laptops with OpenOffice on it; I admire them, but I'm not dealing with our sales team trying to figure out what an ODF is).
I love this "petty kingdom" budget model, by the way, as someone whose work personality could be described as "cheap analyst." I'm paying $40/month per head for Software X in your department, and I have an inferior replacement for $0/month/head which meets specs and which you can't quantify productivity loss for (essentially, it just looks ugly and feels bad). I can therefor cut that out of my budget entirely while meeting my obligations, and if *you* really want the decadent solution, *your* department can bear that cost. Either way, I get plenty more money to basically not have to be a dick (like charging careless employees for broken/stolen equipment, or getting an above-expectations solution for ADA employees); and sometimes, maybe some antennas show up on the roof which would be difficult to justify cost for if asked, but I'm way under-budget so nobody would.
A boring one from today was about select, datalist or some custome element (which LLM can prototype) or some JS libs. Good breakdown; links to playgrounds, rough mocks so team could kick tires. It raises points the team had and had counterpoint to help drive decisions.
In some sense having customer able to prototype what they want is a good thing. I did it myself as i was at the time on that side, and having a quick-whip-it tool was a good thing to quickly get some feature that was missing in the major software before that major software would add it (if at all). (And if one remembers for example Crystal Reports - while for "reports", it and the likes were in many senses such quick-whip-it tools for a lot of such customization that was doable by the customer.)
So, after initial aftershock - "Ahhhh, we don't need software companies anymore!" - we'll get to the state with software companies still doing their thing just with a lot of AI as specialization is one of the main thing in modern economy and AI becomes most powerful tools of the trade. (and various AI components themselves will be part of software delivery, like say a very fine-tuned model (hosted or on-premise) specific to the customer and software - Clippy on steroids)
(Of course some companies wouldn't survive the transition just like some companies didn't survive the transitions to client/server, cloud, etc. while some new companies will emerge like Anthropic has today or Borland had at the time)
LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.
American capitalism hides the depressing fact that rarely does the best succees.
AAI momentum is parallel to just buying lottery tickets and doing so with the belief that you know the real odds, so one can overwhelm with quantity of tickets.
But you are not limited to only using LLM for coding.
I agree that marketing and sales is as important as product and technology, but they are not necessarily safe.
Even if you can build it in a day B2B SaaS will continue to prosper because they sell peace of mind, reliability and compliance. Not features.
Also due to economy of scale it will always be cheaper to buy something from a vendor that sells it to many clients than to DIY it.
You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database.
But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is a bug and you charge someone without delivering anything? How do you prevent fraud? How do you handle disputes?
Someone posted something illegal. What do you do in this situation? Do you call the police? The FBI? What kind of data do you give the authorities? How much data SHOULD you have been logging in the first place in case something like this happens?
One user doesn't like you so he bought a botnet to DDoS your website. How do you handle this? Are they mass posting? Mass creating accounts? Is it possible for them to exhaust all the usernames possible and then nobody can create an account anymore?
Your website is online but if the server blows up you'll lose all the data in the database. You need backups. You need a system to ensure the backups are actually working. But then some guy from the UK said he wants his posts all deleted. What are you going to do now, because his posts are also in the backups, and you don't want to touch those.
Trolls are posting things against the ToS. Who handles these things? Shadowban? So there needs to be a shadowban system? Moderators? So there needs to be a moderator-only section of the website? Should this be integrated with the main website or not?
Then you look at this horrendous mess of 6 paragraphs and you think back about the first paragraph that already did everything you wanted from Twitter. All these other systems, most of the work, and all you actually wanted was the first paragraph.
What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.
It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc.
And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS.
You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business.
Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.
Even then, startups prioritize growth over efficiency. So maybe 100 people would have been fine but 1000 gets them a 5% growth improvement in growth.
Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.
TLDR; yes you do need that many
You absolutely do not. what do you think about the website we are using right now! It has half of the problems listed above.
> facebook
Your work project doesn’t have a billion users.
We were talking about what it would take to fix the technical problems resulting from taking a working program to something people use.
> Any idiot can vibe code
I didn’t say that either.
How is it the HN opinion that it’s impossible to make a web application a lot of people use?
AI has solved the 'coding' part. The business is still very human because they are the ones buying, for now.
Use stripe, cloudflare, whatever the legal equivalent of these stuff, S3.
Yes they might take most potential profit, but you'll also not have a huge payroll.
Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.
They could just download GIMP or find cheaper alternative, that was always an option
And the Google AI subscription is cheaper than any of the SaaS offerings.
Also: In my life the easier it has gotten to create and run software, the more software people have wanted and the more they have been willing to spend on it.
That's not good enough.
Now that the world has successfully laughed off the "our models are so good they're superintelligent" AGI claims, AI companies and investors have moved on to the "our models are so good they're going to do all your workers' jobs" angle.
The insane investment is for AGI/total job replacement, not developer productivity tools. We are going to be sold pie-in-the-sky claims for a long time until the world wisens up to this rhetoric the same way we did with AGI nonsense.
I really don't think it's not going to become "these prompts are specs" and then you have processes of reviewing implementations. It's one thing when you have randos building stuff and they leave etc. Having stored prompts and managed code that uses tools is a different beast.
Although the proponents of this idea argue that companies will create and (!) maintain many tools in-house.
It’s not so much about running a business, since you don’t sell anything and only have internal customers.
people who write this BS - one never don't understand SAAS fundamentals, they only see what's on the screen and forget the complexity that lives on the backend - forget the costs of running such a SAAS
before it was low-code will kill SAAS, then Visual UI builders, now its A.I
just like it was before that crypto will kill Trad-Fi
people who say these things - have tied their identity into it so they whole-heartedly believe the bullshit they say even though reality doesn't match
to anyone curious read the 10k (Annual Report) of any public SAAS - Salesforce | Workday etc - people should admire these companies for the machines / ecosystem they built - and also learn the good & mistakes to avoid i.e the bad
those annual reports tell you how the revenue generation machine works, how much revenue is expected 2+ / 3+ years from now - their weaknesses | headwinds and also tailwinds - how those companies grow and continue to grow etc
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001108524/0...
https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001327811/0...
I hear all of the cost savings benefit, but I never see the team factoring in their own time (and others time) needed to set up and maintain these systems reliably long term.
Something IC’s at company often struggle to understand is the reason why companies often prefer to buy managed solutions even when “free” alternatives exist (read: the free alternatives are also expensive, just a different type of cost)
No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers.
See the problem?
Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this path for our company, but at least on our team we just don’t have enough (redundant) expertise to deploy and manage these systems. We’d have to hire an extra FTE.
If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.
Half of $30k/mo trivially pays for an engineer you hire to only manage such a cluster for you and just works an hour a week unless a pager goes off if you truly need that level of peace of mind. If you’re hiring for such a position I have a few rock star level folks who would love such a job.
The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me. I could come up with the same sort of scenarios for cloud based SaaS infrastructure just as easily.
In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed.
Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it.
> The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me
It really comes down to the people and whether you have the expertise on the team. And whether the team can realistically manage the system long term. It’s typically safer to spend more money for the managed service.
(It’s a safer decision, not necessarily better)
Aren't these people suppose to debug and fix complex problems in prod? And if they can do that, why can't they run and debug a log server?
Of course there are trade offs with any outsourcing decision. But I think we should have higher expectations of engineers
More importantly, with a third party service I'd be very surprised if both went down at the same time and it wasn't a further upstream issue like AWS. If its my own logging service and it went down during a prod outage, I likely didn't properly isolate my logging service in the first place.
1 person? Is that person always on call?
It’s when one person is exceedingly talented at exactly one thing - but isn’t exactly a typical employee who is good or interested in doing much else other than keeping that one thing online and reliable.
Their job is to go live on their mountain for weeks or months at a time without so much as doing anything other than keeping their phone on and answering it within the first couple rings regardless of when called. If they are good at their job you likely don’t even need to call - they already know it’s broken before you do.
I’ve employed a few such folks over my career. They tend to be the “alternative” style candidate - exceptional people with exceptional flaws. They love the simple tradeoff.
That said of course this is ignoring bus factor and overly simplifying things. Typically this is one deep subject level matter expert who sits off on the side of a small team, so there is at least one “understudy” hanging around as well.
I still advocate for such positions when they make sense though. I would much rather in-house my own “insurance” vs overpay some giant company for each month only to find out the insurance didn’t exist when I needed to make a claim. It’s certainly more risk to my career - but I have very strong feelings that as a manager or executive my job is NOT to cover my own ass because it’s easier.
Beyond that, and Im aware this is very much application/company dependent, theres plenty of SaaS companies that offer horrendous or no support no matter what you pay. We used to use splunk for monitoring and logging. Paid a ton of money because we were handling financial data and needed tracibility and reliability. We constantly had to put out fires that were caused by their unreliable platform. It was not a good experience.
Ultimately, we jumped ship to Prometheus. We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.
The problem is all these SaaS companies have cut costs so much that all their support has been reduced to useless offshore at best and at worst a chatbot. They do go down and don't work and often times there's simply nothing you can do. The worst offenders will seize upon the moment and force you to upgrade a support plan before they will even talk to you, even if the issue is their own making.
Unless you're a huge customer and already paying them tons of money, expect to receive no support. Your only line of defense if something happens and you're not a whale is that some whale is upset and they actually have their people working on the problem. If you're a small company, startup, or even mid-size, good luck on getting them to care. You'll probably be sent a survey when you don't renew and may eventually be a quotient in their risk calculus at some point in the distant future, but only if you represent a meaningful mass of customers they lost.
Tremendous opportunity announcement!
If you are building a dev-focused SaaS, treat your support team exactly as they are: a key part of the product. Just like docs or developer experience, the support experience is critical.
Trouble is, it's hard to quantify the negative experience, though tracking word of mouth referrals or NPS scores can try.
99% of the time a cloud migration is because of OpEx/CapEx accounting shenanigans.
How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full salary, right?
In broad strokes there's two ways. You can count it as an operational expense, or you can count it as capital (this takes more work to do but can have some advantages). If you count it as operations, it's just a big red pit you're throwing money into that you hope is offsetting a larger operational cost somewhere (but this can be hard to quantify). If you count it as capital, you're basically storing all of those hours as an "asset" which then loses value over time (it's kind of like the charge in a battery). The problem is you have to be able to show that this internal tool would, in the case of an acquisition or liquidation, be valued by the new owner at the value you're setting it at.
The problem there being that people are even more hesitant to trust somebody else's internal tool than they are to trust their own internal tool, so I've seen multiple managers think "I sunk a million dollars into this so it must be worth something" but in fact they were just running a jobs program for their team.
What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people.
If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.
I think most software companies need to be doing less. Deleting code, refining, and making their product genuinely useful as opposed to "able to technically contort to client needs".
Not if you hire reasonably competent people. These days for vast majority of FOSS services all you need is an ability to spin up a VPS and run a number of simple Docker/Podman Compose commands, it can't be that hard.
Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain overall from using DataDog but only from truly open source solutions that utilized AGPL licenses that allows everyone to move forward together + share lessons together + contribute together toward a common goal of better observability.
Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? This isn't the 1990s, it's 2026. Tooling has gotten quite good over the last decade.
Also corporations stupidly spend money all the time, they over spend too. I recently left a company that was paying SalesForce $10mil a year in licenses when only 8 people in the entire 3,000 person company was using it. I doubt that was the only single instance across our industry too. There is a massive amount of waste and graft in enterprise sales.
I honestly doubt it if you replaced grafana for 10,000 DataDog customers they would notice the difference.
Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that.
On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky.
The expertise just isn’t there at most companies.
20 years ago we had 5 times fewer engineers. And most of those have moved into management, other fields, retired, work calm jobs for the government or boring companies, etc.
How many 40+ year old engineers do you see, especially when compared to 20-30 year old engineers?
Come to think of it, they are right. Why take all this ownership when it's the company that is going to pay for all of this and you can push these responsibilities to some third-party overseas.
In the time it takes to deploy semi-bespoke saas, or while waiting for the current licence term to expire it would be very easy to develop a more suitable and much cheaper product in-house, this was true before AI tools and doubly so now.
Moving SaaS apps in house is a great way for a VP to get a fat bonus or a director to get a promotion but I have to imagine it keeps the CIO/CTO up at night unless they're fully asleep at the switch.
This niche position has had some interesting ramifications for them and for me. They clearly incur a lot of technical debt once their business relies on bespoke software. On the other hand, they own the software and can get an immediate response or new feature or upgrade from me, limited only by my time. And in the end, this ends up saving them time and money. It gives me a permanent and unending flow of work. But if I die, they're pretty screwed.
One reason I don't vibe code things even now, even simple components that could easily be vibe coded, is that I remember and know where everything is, every function or line of code that might be causing issues, because I wrote it myself. I know right away where to look for a query that might be throwing errors after a database upgrade, for instance.
As a manager I assume you would probably not want to go down the road of hiring someone like that, but for companies of a certain size it's an acceptable compromise. However, I wouldn't want to hire someone like that myself unless they were extremely reliable and didn't rely on AI to write any of their code.
Observability is great, dont get me wrong, but past 3 to 6 months of work on the same thing...I can almost beet the observability tools in timetoresolve.
I'm terrible at sales. My clients have only come to me by rererral from other clients. More than half the time, I'll tell prospective clients that there are already SaaS solutions that would be better for them than building something bespoke, and help them find solutions, because I don't want to do work that's already been done.
When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever
Right now it can get part way there but quickly falls flat.
In 12-24 months? It’ll be able to audit itself and determine how to fix issues as they come up, mid-stream. That’s (all of) what a human dev does.
Paper forms have some amazing features that software really can't compete with. And also some significant downsides that software fixes.
However, they dont have a choice. The sentiment of shareholders is that they want their cash (yes it is their cash that managers re-invest on their behalf) to be invested in AI-related projects.
So...... you get what you get, and investors will get what they deserve. But they will still blame the management in the end ;)
They are not stupid, far from it, most are (very) high functioning sociopaths. And out and up there its everybody for themselves first.
With AI, I can only see the rate of such changes sky rocketing due to expectations wildly misaligned with reality. Hence we are unlikely to see any meaningful improvements.
Of course some overdo it. I've seen companies with more random SaaS tools than staff, connected with shaky Zapier workflows, manual processes, or not at all. No backups, no sense of risks, just YOLOing. That's OK in some cases, in others really not.
I suppose it does need some engineering thinking to find the right things and employ them in a good way. Unfortunately even developers commonly lack that.
"Now that I'm in management, I 100% get it." 100% and win or lose I am still going to fight it...
what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?
If your senior developers can slap together something better than an expensive SAAS offering you want them directing that energy at your core products/services rather than supporting tools.
And the people deciding to buy the expensive SAAS tools are often not the people using them, and typically don't care too much about how crappy the tool may or may not be for doing the job it's advertising as doing.
A typical SaaS customer will use many pieces of software (we mostly call them SaaS now) across its various functions: HR, accounting, CRM, etc. Each one of those will have access to the same pool of senior devs and AI tools, but they will pour more resources into each area and theoretically deliver better software.
The bigger issue here is the economics of the C-suite have not changed here. Assume a 100 CPG company uses 10-20 SaaS apps. Salesforce might be $100k/year or whatever. 1Password is $10k. Asana $10k. etc. They add up, but on the other hand it is not productive to task a $150k employee with rebuilding a $10k tool. And even with AI, it would take a lot of effort to make something that will satisfy a team accustomed to any modern SaaS tool like Salesforce or Atlassian. (Engineers will not even move off Github, and it's literally built on free software.)
That's before I get to sensitive areas. Do you want to use a vibe-coded accounting system? Inventory system? Payroll? You can lose money, employees, and customer perception very rapidly due to some bugs. Who wants to be responsible for all their employee passwords are compromised because they wanted to save $800/mo?
Then, the gains from cutting SaaS are capped. You can only cut your SaaS spend to zero. On the other hand, if you have those engineers you can point them at niche problems in your business niche (which you know better than anyone) and create conditions for your business to grow faster. The returns from this are uncapped.
TL;DR; it's generally not a great idea to build in-house unless your requirements are essentially bespoke.
The gains is generally more seen outside of monetary as these SaaS solutions where holding us back for achieving our goals and improving our services to our customers. As in the end of the day our customers do not care if "insert SaaS" is having issues, it will always be our problem to own.
The second question is a valid one, and I think it will somewhat raise the bar of what successful SAAS vendors will have to offer in coming years
There's a large, stable entity that management can sue if something goes very wrong.
At the end of the day these decisions are all series of trade-offs, and the trick is understanding your requirements and capabilities well enough to make the right trade-offs.
Somehow that has not happened yet in 2026.
I also spent a solid two weeks in the admin panel chainsawing as much Jira bloat as I could. It's perfectly adequate now.
Companies in most cases don’t want to build SaaS because it is expensive to hire engineers to do it, not because they are allergic to owning teams.
If in-housing becomes substantially cheaper than the alternatives then companies will adapt.
But even if the new equilibrium is to hire a contract dev shop to build something custom to keep avoiding responsibility, this would have the same impact on SaaS.
So I’m pretty skeptical of this first-principles prediction expressing right level of uncertainty.
Whose job had been maintaining a single internal system but had never had the bandwidth to expand their focus.
Companies like that are the ones spending millions a year for large one size fits all SaaS products.
If you can spend $10K/year to keep your in house one alive but $5K/year on the new SaaS option, you stop building your own again.
Vs if I contract a shop, then I have a dedicated team ramped up on my domain who then can vet infra providers and choose the best tech. So potentially still some SaaS, but probably shifting more to PaaS.
Similar to how you don’t hire your Salesforce or SAP contractors from these companies, I would predict this model spreads to other platforms too, and may make OSS viable in more places.
If you're selling honey online, say, how bespoke does your inventory management tool really need to be? And are there no lessons you'd learn from a SaaS tool that you'd not have thought of on your own?
But I think it’s plausible that SaaS companies will be easier to start with AI coding, and with lower costs (thanks to AI) they will be able to get into the black with a smaller addressable market. So each one can have a different mix of fewer features, for different segments of customers, at lower prices.
The result would be a loss of pricing power by the incumbent do-everything big guys: no more baked-in 10% annual increases. Which is still a pretty big change in their economics. And therefore valuations.
We've been through cycles of outsourcing and in-housing skill before. This seems similar but for tools and services. Maybe we'll see internal teams taking the reigns back to replace bad-fit SaaS products.
There's still a lot of risk associated with in-housing though (perhaps more than before). That means the real opportunity is for new, leaner B2B SaaS businesses to step in, especially if there's a displacement effect from seeing internally built prototypes of expensive subscription software.
25 years here. You can absolutely do this. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be.
The junior programmer you are talking about who wanted to rewrite it in a weekend tends to come back with a working program, not empty handed.
Actually having to support multiple businesses with commercial software is hard. I've written a ton of custom software that far surpasses the capabilities of commercial offerings but if were to turn that into it's own commercial offering it would be large undertaking.
There's an engineering trap/fallacy I like to call "how hard could it be". How hard could it be to build a [whatever] clone? If you find yourself thinking that, stop what you're doing, because the answer is almost always "at least an order of magnitude harder than you think."
If you’ve only worked on that kind of software it’s hard to know the alternative which is to aggressively prune code paths and rework your main code.
And open source example is Quake. I rarely come across software whose inherent complexity is more than quake.
1. That's not a great use of the developer's time, and
2. anything in-house increases our training and support costs
2. If the in-house software doesn't decrease training time or support costs then there is something wrong there.
AI could change that for good.
The problem with this kind of thinking is that it strips away all nuance. At some point you have to be responsible for something ... otherwise you don't have a business. You are simply a wrapper around your SaaS providers and tightly coupled to their success. The key is knowing when to offload and when to keep it in house. Quite frankly, your average weekend MBA VP simply doesn't have the expertise to make these kinds of decisions. This is why so many VPs exit before things get bad.
That sounds dysfunctional. The purpose of management is to manage risk, not to avoid it. A proper manager would be able to quantify both the risks and the costs, present those figures in an easy overview, and then be able to defend their decision (or advise higher management) using that.
The age of the business developer has re-arrived.
For the first time in my career, I can point to multi million euro external suppliers, tell my environment "that's basicly an API + authentication from X to Z, let's develop that ourselves" and get a response of "When" instead of "No". B2B SaaS is toast in my perspective, as are boutique firms delivering solutions + consulting. I can create a million euro team easily (that's like five developer years), if they deliver a successful insourcing. And now I feel like writing MBA-slop, but's it's all about growing your IT maturity. All insourced code is future maintenance expenditure. You need to balance that to the benefits.
I love this perspective. I feel like the pendulum has swung too far back to "it's easy to build, it'll be easy to support". But to be fair, it was probably too far the other way a few years ago: "it was easy to buy, it'll be easy to have them support it".
Other than trial and error, how do you think about pricing out maintenance costs for insourced code vs purchased functionality?
2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app.
3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project.
5. Pain
Doing this today, in production, with full trust, is clearly not wise, but the writing is clearly on the wall that this is going to be the norm more and more over the coming years. The times they are a-changin.
And "it will be the norm" is a clear corollary of, absent any significant and unforeseen roadblock, even with the current highly imperfect agentic sausage-making factories we have today, what capabilities will be in like 6-12 months time.
The key here is that the moving target will _never_ be "what can 1-2 people vibe code without any expectation of being the best at what it does?"
(Also: training people on bespoke tools takes much longer than training on configurations of standard tools. Imagine if you had to learn a new source control system at every job, like in the '80s.)
3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4. Employee continue in the company and request help (or the managers see the need):
4.1 They hire more, but if all are vibe-coders too
4.1.1 The product gets more complicated (no more complex, that good developers can manage!)
4.1.2 Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4.1.3 People start to get desperate, not worries! now:
4.1.3.1 Somebody vibe-code a new alternative that solves the immediate problem
4.1.3.2 Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4.1.3.3 Needs to sync with the other tools
4.1.3.3.1 Somebody vibe-code the sync that solves the immediate problem
(the saga continue)
In parallel:
4.2 Eventually is obvious that need external help
THEN:
4.2.1 They ask for consultors for build tool, of course, from a company that has embraced the IA!
4.2.2 They build new shinny tool!
4.2.3 Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4.2.4 Needs to sync with the other tools ....
AND:
4.3.1 They ask for consultors, to teach them what to do, of course, from a company that has embraced the IA!
4.3.2 New shinny theory of how do the thing with IA is now being implemented!
4.3.3 It require a rewrite of not only past solutions but, a change of how the company behave!
4.3.3.1 Needs to sync with the other tools .......
4.3.4 And it spark beautiful office/political debates around some philosophical whatever that also trigger changes in the structure, hiring or whatever, alienating the people that has been working there, that after months, has started getting the handle of it!
4.3.5 Employees either leaves the company or moves on to another project.
4.3.6 New employees arrive, with a wild new IA tool and different vibes that vibe-coding!
... the saga continues
5. Is now clear that it need to buy a product form a well stablished software provider
5.1 And all of them are now in the IA craze!
.............
lol
Well, with claude, you can download the code, tell it to implement LDAP authentication, and smile all the way to the bank. And for said fortune 500 company, employing an employee to spend 100% of their time maintaining the app at 10k per month is a 15k savings! And because it _doesn't really take 100% of their time_ it's really only like $500 per month? And to be completely honest, how man times did you get Jira to fast-track your issue?
I get it however, the manager angle. It's still a distraction. But the article being referenced still shows revenue going down.
There's definitely a lot of cope in here, mostly because SaaS is keeping them employed... be ready, the crush is "almosthere".
If the cost to the company is $10K a month, the developer's topline salary is $60K, which is going to be a hard hire to make.
And, again, if they can integrate LDAP with an existing software package at that price point, I want them doing something more valuable than that.
But then keep in mind one who built the replacement will become the owner of an application that business doesn’t want to pay for and that person will be cost center for the company.
That person better get marketing and negotiating skills that Atlassian has on board because that person will be responsible for the app and will not be getting salary increases for working on something that is not core business of the company.
Even if you can make LLM to do the app for you.