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Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly u

by nine_k 11mo ago

Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. From where I sit, right now, this does not seem to be the case. This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software.

martinald 11mo ago
It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level. Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations. For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features. Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.
- nugger 11mo ago
  I don't understand the timelines here at all.
  - figers 11mo ago
    We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?
      - figers 11mo ago
        We already had Developers and the system in place this was a tiny feature in the scheme of things. Internally it gives us a competitive advantage of the data being in our system from the beginning of the pipeline through the rest of the system where the data would be needed anyway.
      - crabmusket 11mo ago
        If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?
        raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.
        9rx 11mo ago
        All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity. The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero. Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce. Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.
- lossolo 11mo ago
  > It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with How many samples do you have? Which industries are they from? Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features? > ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?
  - wongarsu 11mo ago
    Lots of companies make good money selling the equivalent of leftpad for confluence or jira. Anecdotally, that's exactly the kind of stuff that gets replaced with homegrown AI-built solutions at our company
  - hobs 11mo ago
    I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again). Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities. Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.
  - dismantlethesun 11mo ago
    I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote. We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source. Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze. Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache. We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source. While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability. Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'? I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.
- renewiltord 11mo ago
  I know of at least two multi-billion corps that are moving to internal ETL tools instead of 5tran now because the cost to maintain internally is much lower and you can customize for cheap. SaaS as a model is at risk without something tying someone down.
  - Spooky23 11mo ago
    The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it. For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on powerapps and have zero new opex.
    - pdimitar 11mo ago
      Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts. If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it. They don't get this psychological aspect at all.
      - Spooky23 11mo ago
        Most of them are in the business of getting acquired, not the business of doing the business.
        pdimitar 11mo ago
        As a non-American this still surprises me to this day. Thanks for the reminder. I really need to learn to look at an even bigger picture.
thot_experiment 11mo ago
To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.
- layer8 11mo ago
  We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.
  - AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
    Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works. I'm not seeing that either.
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps. Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?
  - bsder 11mo ago
    Why should you see a flurry of software? What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up. Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.
  - vachina 11mo ago
    > Local-first > Not seeing any Working exactly as intended?
paulddraper 11mo ago
> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. NODS HEAD VIGOROUSLY Last 12 months: Docusign down 37%, Adobe down 38%, Atlassian down 41%, Asana down 41%, Monday.com down 44%, Hubspot down 49%. Eventbrite being bought for pennies. They are being replaced by newer, smaller, cheaper, sometimes internal solutions.
- BobbyJo 11mo ago
  Stock prices down or revenue down? The former would do very little to support your point.
  - hagbarth 11mo ago
    Revenue is all up. And as far as I can see beating expectations.
    - wotWhytho 11mo ago
      [dead]
  - paulddraper 11mo ago
    Stock prices. The latter would do very little to support my point, as it doesn't consider future growth trends.
    - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
      The former does far less to support your point, because it's only indicative of what people expect to happen. It is not actually evidence that their predictions will come true.
      - paulddraper 11mo ago
        I don't have any evidence for how revenue will change in the next quarterly report.
xnx 11mo ago
> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90% It definitely has for me. I'm creating toolS and utilities every week easily that I never would've attempted in the past. > This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software. Lots of people can think logically and organize a process flow, but don't know all the ridiculous code incantations (and worse development and hosting environment details) to turn their plans into tools. It's trivial to one-shot all kinds of impressive toys in Gemini now, but it's going to be an even bigger deal when Google adds some type of persistent data storage. It will be like the rebirth of a fully modern Microsoft Access.
kenjackson 11mo ago
It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.
- TheRoque 11mo ago
  But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
  - emodendroket 11mo ago
    They're better than one might expect at diagnosing issues from the error output or even just screenshots.
  - kenjackson 11mo ago
    I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes. I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large code bases. One of the things we did in grad school was to go through gcc and contribute something to it. Man, that code was so complex and compilers are one of my specialties (at the time). I think having an LLM with me would have made the task 100x easier.
    - devin 11mo ago
      Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow patterns of thought.
codegeek 11mo ago
The keyword is "building". Yes costs may have dropped 90% just to build software. But there are 1000 other things that comes after it to run a successful software for months let alone years. - Maintenance, Security - Upgrades and patches - Hosting and ability to maintain uptime with traffic - Support and dealing with customer complexities - New requirements/features - Most importantly, ability to blame someone else (at least for management). Politics plays a part. If you build a tool in-house and it fails, you are on the chopping block. If you buy, you at least can say "Hey everyone else bought it too and I shouldn't be fired for that". Customers pay for all of the above when they buy a SAAS subscription. AI may come for most of the above at some point but not yet. I say give it 3-5 years to see how it all pans out.
- socketcluster 11mo ago
  Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. What you've listed are the easy parts that are within people's control. You didn't list the most critical part, the actual bottleneck which is not within people's control. The market is now essentially controlled by algorithms. I predict there will be amazing software... Which will end up ignored by the markets completely until their features are copied by big tech and nobody will know where the idea originated. Building is absolutely worthless in the context of a monopolized marketplace.
  - baxtr 11mo ago
    Agreed. What you call exposure others might call distribution or attention.
    - aswegs8 11mo ago
      Marketing.
  - theshrike79 11mo ago
    > Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. There are SO FUCKING MANY tools for marketing your shitty SaaS all over subreddits dedicated for people to advertise their new services and applications. I had to unsubscribe from all of them because about a year ago they went from semi-interesting to 100 different "my SaaS AI tool will automatically advertise your AI SaaS tool on social media" solutions every week.
klntsky 11mo ago
People vibe one-off solutions for themselves all the time. They just don't have the desire to productionalize them. Frankly, product knowledge is something LLMs are not that good at
- RajT88 11mo ago
  Low code solutions like PowerApps I bang out stuff like this all the time. If your use case is limited enough, it makes lazy developers very productive.
- viraptor 11mo ago
  Same. I hate doing mobile coding, but just in the last few months I AI-coded 3 apps specifically for my needs. They'll never get released publicly, because they'd need polish and features that I don't care about personally. They potentially replace some SaaS too.
  - figers 11mo ago
    What did the 3 apps do? I did the same for one app to give me my speed in MPH as huge text as a HUD in a car
    - viraptor 11mo ago
      Very specific training app for guitar with spaced repetition, automated message forwarder (all good ones demand subscription), and something very specific to me.
  - tjr 11mo ago
    In context, it sounds like you are saying you used AI to make these three applications? Why can't AI add the polish and features also?
    - viraptor 11mo ago
      It can. It's just not needed for my own apps. It would be needed for a public release and I'm just... not interested in that enough. It would cost me time and likely never get enough return.
wotWhytho 11mo ago
[dead]
jayd16 11mo ago
I mean, we have had the tech to crank out some little app for a long time. The point of the Saas used to be that you had a neck to strangle when things went south. I guess these days that's just impossible anyhow and the prices aren't worth it so we're rediscovering that software can be made instead of bought? There have been a lot of little blogs about "home cooking" style apps that you make for yourself. Maybe AI is the microwave meal version.
phantasmish 11mo ago
Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so. You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards. Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded” It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient. I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.
- mattgreenrocks 11mo ago
  Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency. This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
  - RajT88 11mo ago
    I would make the case as well that software underwent demographic shift as the demand skyrocketed and the barriers to entering the profession with languages and tooling dropped. 80's/90's dev teams were more weird nerds with very high dedication to their craft. Today devs are much more regular people, but there are a lot more of them.
    - mattgreenrocks 11mo ago
      Definitely. There’s pluses and minuses to that shift.
- dghlsakjg 11mo ago
zahlman 11mo ago
> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. Don't forget the second-order effect of clients deciding they could do it in-house.
- PaulHoule 11mo ago
  In fact that is where AI could win. An in house system only needs to serve the needs of one customer whereas the SAAS has to be built for the imagined needs of many customers —- when you’re lucky you can “build one to throw away” and not throw it away.
  - zahlman 11mo ago
    Yes, that was my point. It gets hard for the new SaaS competitors to "undercut" the established players when the underlying market disappears.
socketcluster 11mo ago
This is assuming the marketplace works perfectly... Which is an incorrect assumption. Reality is that the marketplace is highly controlled by algorithms. New platforms will struggle to get exposure... No exposure, no credibility, no word of mouth, no users, catch 22... You think the big players will allow small SaaS projects to gain traction on their platforms? Have you seen how centralized the Internet is these days? Have you seen how afraid people are of betting on no-name platforms? If they choose the wrong no-name platforms and tools, they will lose their (increasingly precious) jobs. As the saying goes "Nobody lost their job for choosing IBM." As for B2C; it's dead, consumers don't have money and will have less of it in the future; the mass-market game is over. My bet is if there were a lot of great apps being built, even excellent quality, nobody would even hear about them. The big players would copy them before anyone even found out about them. IMO, the market is not even a playing field anymore, this is why everyone is getting into politics now, though politics is also somewhat monopolized, there is still more potential for success because there is such an abundance of dissatisfied people willing to look outside of mainstream channels. It's much easier to sell political ideologies than to sell products.
- acessoproibido 11mo ago
  "Everything is controlled by algorithms" doesnt make any sense - its like saying everything is subject to entropy - well sure but also what?
  - socketcluster 11mo ago
    It's not the same because who controls the algorithms matters here. The algorithms work for some entities and against other entities. They are not neutral at all. They are aligned through shared monetary incentives, so well aligned that they would probably be less aligned if it was a literal conspiracy. TBH. I'm kind of shocked I still have to explain this. When you get on the wrong side of the algorithms you will understand, you will understand viscerally. And I do mean 'when' not 'if'. Maybe the algorithms have been working for you so far and you're not feeling them but just give it a few years. Unfortunately, once you understand, you won't have a voice anymore and those still in the game won't have enough empathy to help you.
almosthere 11mo ago
LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS. Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system. Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore. Now with agentic code, instead of "buy splunk" or "buy jira" or whatever thing they are trying to do, they have one of those "teens now in their mid twenties" that are SUPER excited about Agentic flows, either write an agentic tool or simply use an agentic tool to code up the 300 lines of code that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk or whatever. Since most people only use 5% of the total features of any product, there's no reason to buy tools anymore, just build it for a fraction of the cost. I don't know if the above is where we're at right now, but it's coming.
- actionfromafar 11mo ago
  Creating code sprawl, weird ball of twine systems etc until someone says, enough, we will just buy this SAAS solution which integrates it all. Rinse, repeat.
- myk9001 11mo ago
  > that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk Or a JS runtime like Bun. Oh, wait...
- roncesvalles 11mo ago
  Nobody is replacing Jira or Splunk with anything coming out of an LLM.
- bmikaili 11mo ago
  Yeahh, right, I'm not sure splunk is that simple.
- heavyset_go 11mo ago
  This is "people will 3D print cars in their garage, manufacturing is over!" level of hype
raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation. And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base? “No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”. I once had influence over the buying decision to support an implementation I was leading. I found this perfect SaaS product by a one man shop who was local. Working with my CTO and lawyers, we made a proposal to the founder. We would sign with him and be 70% of his post signing revenue if he agreed to give us our own self hosted instance and put his latest code in escrow with a third party (Green Mountain) and we would have non exclusive rights to use the code (but not distribute it) under certain circumstances.
- pdimitar 11mo ago
  Did he agree?
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    Yep and he agreed to let us verify that the code he installed on our servers were built from source and the same code was in escrow at Green Mountain. The terms weren’t as onerous as it sounds. It was basically if he stopped supporting it or got hit by a bus, we would get access.
- benjiro 11mo ago
  He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs. Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company. The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a outsider. Internal solution used to be bad because if the person with the knowledge of the codebase left, you ended up screwed. But with LLMs and "vibe" coding, there becomes a disconnect between the code and whoever wrote it. Making it easier to later make modifications on that same codebase, using ... LLMs.
eirikbakke 11mo ago
I'd also expect to see a lot more AI-generated PRs on open source projects. (Or at least AI-assisted to the point where the author feels like they should mention it.)
vidarh 11mo ago
For a lot of SaaS projects building the software is the simplest part.
roncesvalles 11mo ago
There is also the missing explosion of App Store app submissions and other such metrics.
trollbridge 11mo ago
Astute observation. From where I sit, the market (at least for business software; I am not very familiar with the consumer market) seems to be wide open, and businesses in the 5 - 200 employee range seem to be particularly underserved. The marketplace for software for single-owner shops or 1-5 employee size places does seem to be quite strong, and then there's enterprise software, but small business seems to have a software marketplace that is atrociously bad. Here is the typical thing a prospective customer asks me to fix for them: - They are using some piece of software that is essential to their business. - There really isn't much good competition for that software, and it would be a large cost to convert to another platform that also has all the same downsides below. - The software vendor used to be great, but seems to have been sold several times. - The vendor has recently switched to a subscription-only model and keeps on raising subscription prices in the 12% or so range every year, and the cost of this has started to become noticeable in their budget. - They were accustomed to software being a capital investment with a modest ongoing cost for support, but now it's becoming just an expense. - Quality has taken a nosedive and in particular new features are buggy. Promised integrations seem quite lacking and new features/integrations feel bolted on. - Support is difficult to get ahold of, and the formerly good telephone support then got replaced by being asked to open tickets/emails and now has been replaced by an AI chatbot frontend before they can even open a ticket. Most issues go unresolved. There are literally millions of software packages in existence, and the bulk of them by numbers are niche products used by small businesses. (Think of a software package which solely exists to help you write custom enhancements for another software package which is used by a specific sector of the furniture-manufacturing business, to get an example.) The quality of this sector is not improving. This is a field that is absolutely ripe for improvement. If the cost of building software really were dropping 90%, this would be a very easy field to move into and simply start offering for $6,000 a year the product that your competition is charging $12,000 a year for, for an inferior product. Before you bring up things like vendor lock-in or the pain of migration... why can't you write software to solve those problems, too? After all, the cost of writing a migration tool should be 90% cheaper now, too, right?
pizzafeelsright 11mo ago
I found that the time (1-4 hours) is enough to build any SaaS for myself
Kerrick 11mo ago
"We use AI to build the tools because we use them in cursor or Visual Studio or code or wherever else people are making our stuff. I use AI a bunch." https://37signals.com/podcast/listener-questions/ https://37signals.com/podcast/listener-questions/ "Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been. [...] we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. [...] And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever." https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291 https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291
weird-eye-issue 11mo ago
Your comment contradicts itself You are saying there aren't more low cost alternatives coming out You also say writing code isn't the big problem (which I agree with) But both can be true and in fact the reason is because the second is true! You aren't seeing the alternate because marketing is hard. People generally don't care about new products and aren't willing to save a little bit of money risking their time on something new
Madmallard 11mo ago
barrier to entry is more problematic than anything else make something decent in the same space as an existing mega-corporation's tool? prepare to get sued and they also steal your good ideas and implement them themselves because you don't have the money to fight them in court
codyswann 11mo ago
Code isn't the moat and it hasn't been for quite some time. Data is the moat.
theshrike79 11mo ago
No no, that's not how it works. The crap I build _replaces_ someone else's SaaS (or free open source) product. They solve my exact problem and nothing else and they follow the ways I like to use my software, with no fancy Dockerised WebUIs etc. I have exactly zero intention of putting any of that shit out there as any kind of service with user accounts and billing and all of the associated stress. A few of them might be something I could sell as a SaaS offering, but I'm not interested in it at all. Most of them are on my Github though for anyone to get and use as they see fit, but then it's up to them if the vibe coded program does something it shouldn't :)
mbesto 11mo ago
> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. Aha. Are developers finally realizing that just writing code doesn't make a business? We actually have a ton of SaaS companies being born right now but they're not making headway, because functionality and good code don't necessarily mean good businesses. Building a business is hard.
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pllbnk 11mo ago
I have seen it commonly cited (although haven't bothered to check the actual sources, mostly because I believe they should be taken with a grain of salt) that developers spend somewhere in the ballpark of 50-60% of their time doing "coding work" - that is writing the code, thinking about the solution in terms of technical aspects, reading code reviews. The rest are meetings, coordination, administrative tasks, being blocked or whatever else you can think of. Even if, wishfully thinking, the value of the act of "coding work" fell by 90%, the act of doing "software engineering" work would still cost no less than 50% of what it currently does. Headlines like these are alarmist and have little substance. Edit: I also feel stumped why so many people give in to this hype that LLMs are good at coding when they can't even do seemingly simple tasks of plain English language summarization accurately as evidenced in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE. If the AI summarizes the code in its own context incorrectly then it will not be able to write it correctly either.
deleted 11mo ago
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burnerRhodov2 11mo ago
from my perspective, this is exactly where we are. Have you ever watched starter story? There's hundreds of people with 5,6+ apps making 100k+ MRR. The VC model is broken because of it.

by nine_k 11mo ago

martinald 11mo ago

It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with. A few of them are starting to replace SaaS tools with custom built internal tooling. I suspect this pattern is happening everywhere to a varying level. Often these SaaS tools are expensive, aren't actually that complicated (or if they are complicated, the bit they need isn't) and have limitations. For example, a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features. Result = dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool. It's shipped and in production now. It would have taken similar amount of time to work around the API deprecation.

nugger 11mo ago
I don't understand the timelines here at all.
- figers 11mo ago
  We were paying for Salesforce, then built the features we needed to do the same tracking into our interal tool and got rid of Salesforce to save money and simplify the data internally across departments
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    And now you have to spend money on developers for a system that “doesn’t make the beer taste better”. Does it give you a competitive advantage in the market?
    - figers 11mo ago
      We already had Developers and the system in place this was a tiny feature in the scheme of things. Internally it gives us a competitive advantage of the data being in our system from the beginning of the pipeline through the rest of the system where the data would be needed anyway.
    - crabmusket 11mo ago
      If they saved money, as they said it did, then... yes?
      - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        Saved money in the short term. But maintenance costs money. Amazon has all of the money in the world and could easily duplicate everything Salesforce does. Yet they use Salesforce internally.
        9rx 11mo ago
        All the money in the world would not be sufficient to cover the cost of seeing human developers duplicate Salesforce on any reasonable time scale. There are simply not enough developers in existence to see that happen, driving the cost towards infinity. The idea here, however, is that machine developers are changing the calculus. If you need more machine developers it takes, what, a few days to produce the necessary hardware? Instead of 20+ years to produce the legacy human hardware. Meaning, for all intents and purposes, there is no observable limit to how much software machine can create, driving the cost towards zero. Yeah, sure, the tech still isn't anywhere near capable enough to reproduce something like Salesforce in its entirety. But it is claimed that it is already there for the most trivial of services. Not all SaaS services are Salesforce-like behemoths. Think something more like patio11's bingo card creator. It is conceivable, however, that technology advancement will continue such that someday even Salesforce becomes equally trivial to reproduce. Maintenance is not a meaningful cost unless you also want to continually have the software do more and more. That could tip the favour towards SaaS — but only if the SaaS service is in alignment with the same future you wish for. If you have to start paying them for bespoke modifications... Have fun with that. You'll be wishing you were paying for maintenance of your own product instead. Especially when said machines drive the cost of that maintenance to near-zero all the same.
lossolo 11mo ago
> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with How many samples do you have? Which industries are they from? Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features? > ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?
- wongarsu 11mo ago
  Lots of companies make good money selling the equivalent of leftpad for confluence or jira. Anecdotally, that's exactly the kind of stuff that gets replaced with homegrown AI-built solutions at our company
- hobs 11mo ago
  I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again). Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities. Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.
- dismantlethesun 11mo ago
  I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote. We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source. Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze. Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache. We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source. While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability. Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'? I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.
renewiltord 11mo ago
I know of at least two multi-billion corps that are moving to internal ETL tools instead of 5tran now because the cost to maintain internally is much lower and you can customize for cheap. SaaS as a model is at risk without something tying someone down.
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  The greed/“capture all of the value” mindset of SaaS kills it, because you can infer the cost of delivery in many cases and beat it. For anything that is billed by the human, O365 is the benchmark. I’m not paying some stupid company $30/mo for some basic process, I use our scale to justify hiring a couple of contractors to build 80% of what they do for $400-600k in a few months. Half the time I can have them build on powerapps and have zero new opex.
  - pdimitar 11mo ago
    Yeah true, the downfall of most SaaS services I used was that they were too careful trying to build too much moat and sabotage any competing efforts. If they were a little more chill then I'd think they could make much more money. I personally would pay a few services, even as an individual, right now, if I knew I could always get a good database / JSON dump of everything at a 5-minute notice, and build my own thing on top of it. They don't get this psychological aspect at all.
    - Spooky23 11mo ago
      Most of them are in the business of getting acquired, not the business of doing the business.
      - pdimitar 11mo ago
        As a non-American this still surprises me to this day. Thanks for the reminder. I really need to learn to look at an even bigger picture.

thot_experiment 11mo ago

To be fair, writing a SaaS software is like an order, perhaps two orders of magnitude more effort than writing software that runs on a computer and does the thing you want. There's a ton of stuff that SaaS is used for now that's basically trivial and literally all the "engineering" effort is spent on ensuring vendor lock in and retaining control of the software so that you can force people to keep paying you.

layer8 11mo ago
We should also get a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality native local-first software, but I’m not seeing any.
- AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  Also also, we should reach the point where you have decent quality source code for a local application, and you can tell GPT "SaaS this", and it works. I'm not seeing that either.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  And why would this happen? Local to what every SaaS product I use is available on my Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad and the web. Some are web only and some are web and apps. Who is going to maintain the local software? Who is going to maintain the servers for self hosted or the client software?
- bsder 11mo ago
  Why should you see a flurry of software? What LLMs demonstrate is that the problem is dealing with people, not software. Look at the number of open source maintainers who are hanging it up. Unless you have a path to monetization, writing software for anybody but yourself is a fool's errand.
- vachina 11mo ago
  > Local-first > Not seeing any Working exactly as intended?

paulddraper 11mo ago

> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. NODS HEAD VIGOROUSLY Last 12 months: Docusign down 37%, Adobe down 38%, Atlassian down 41%, Asana down 41%, Monday.com down 44%, Hubspot down 49%. Eventbrite being bought for pennies. They are being replaced by newer, smaller, cheaper, sometimes internal solutions.

BobbyJo 11mo ago
Stock prices down or revenue down? The former would do very little to support your point.
- hagbarth 11mo ago
  Revenue is all up. And as far as I can see beating expectations.
  - wotWhytho 11mo ago
    [dead]
- paulddraper 11mo ago
  Stock prices. The latter would do very little to support my point, as it doesn't consider future growth trends.
  - bigstrat2003 11mo ago
    The former does far less to support your point, because it's only indicative of what people expect to happen. It is not actually evidence that their predictions will come true.
    - paulddraper 11mo ago
      I don't have any evidence for how revenue will change in the next quarterly report.

xnx 11mo ago

> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90% It definitely has for me. I'm creating toolS and utilities every week easily that I never would've attempted in the past. > This is as if writing down the code is not the biggest problem, or the biggest time sink, of building software. Lots of people can think logically and organize a process flow, but don't know all the ridiculous code incantations (and worse development and hosting environment details) to turn their plans into tools. It's trivial to one-shot all kinds of impressive toys in Gemini now, but it's going to be an even bigger deal when Google adds some type of persistent data storage. It will be like the rebirth of a fully modern Microsoft Access.

kenjackson 11mo ago

It has dropped by maybe MORE than 90%. My sons school recently asked me to build some tools for them -- I did this over a decade ago for them, for free. I did it again using AI tools (different problem though) and I had it mostly done in 30 minutes (after I got the credentials set up properly -- that took up more time than the main coding part). This was probably several days of work for me in the past.

TheRoque 11mo ago
But in the past, you knew the codebase very well, and it was trivial to implement a fix and upgrade the software. Can the same be done with LLMs ? Well from what I see, it depends on your luck. But if the LLMs can't help you, then you gotta read the whole codebase that you've never read before and you quickly lose the initial benefits. I don't doubt someday we'll get there though.
- emodendroket 11mo ago
  They're better than one might expect at diagnosing issues from the error output or even just screenshots.
- kenjackson 11mo ago
  I've hit this in little bursts, but one thing I've found is that LLMs are really good at reasoning about their own code and helping me understand how to diagnose and make fixes. I recently found some assembly source for some old C64 games and used an LLM to walk me through it (purely recreational). It was so good at it. If I was teaching a software engineering class, I'd have students use LLMs to do analysis of large code bases. One of the things we did in grad school was to go through gcc and contribute something to it. Man, that code was so complex and compilers are one of my specialties (at the time). I think having an LLM with me would have made the task 100x easier.
  - devin 11mo ago
    Does that mean you don't think you learned anything valuable through the experience of working through this complexity yourself? I'm not advocating for everyone to do all of their math on paper or something, but when I look back on the times I learned the most, it involved a level of focus and dedication that LLMs simply do not require. In fact, I think their default settings may unfortunately lead you toward shallow patterns of thought.

codegeek 11mo ago

The keyword is "building". Yes costs may have dropped 90% just to build software. But there are 1000 other things that comes after it to run a successful software for months let alone years. - Maintenance, Security - Upgrades and patches - Hosting and ability to maintain uptime with traffic - Support and dealing with customer complexities - New requirements/features - Most importantly, ability to blame someone else (at least for management). Politics plays a part. If you build a tool in-house and it fails, you are on the chopping block. If you buy, you at least can say "Hey everyone else bought it too and I shouldn't be fired for that". Customers pay for all of the above when they buy a SAAS subscription. AI may come for most of the above at some point but not yet. I say give it 3-5 years to see how it all pans out.

socketcluster 11mo ago
Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. What you've listed are the easy parts that are within people's control. You didn't list the most critical part, the actual bottleneck which is not within people's control. The market is now essentially controlled by algorithms. I predict there will be amazing software... Which will end up ignored by the markets completely until their features are copied by big tech and nobody will know where the idea originated. Building is absolutely worthless in the context of a monopolized marketplace.
- baxtr 11mo ago
  Agreed. What you call exposure others might call distribution or attention.
  - aswegs8 11mo ago
    Marketing.
- theshrike79 11mo ago
  > Good points but this list is missing the most critical problem which AI does not solve; exposure. There are SO FUCKING MANY tools for marketing your shitty SaaS all over subreddits dedicated for people to advertise their new services and applications. I had to unsubscribe from all of them because about a year ago they went from semi-interesting to 100 different "my SaaS AI tool will automatically advertise your AI SaaS tool on social media" solutions every week.

klntsky 11mo ago

People vibe one-off solutions for themselves all the time. They just don't have the desire to productionalize them. Frankly, product knowledge is something LLMs are not that good at

RajT88 11mo ago
Low code solutions like PowerApps I bang out stuff like this all the time. If your use case is limited enough, it makes lazy developers very productive.
viraptor 11mo ago
Same. I hate doing mobile coding, but just in the last few months I AI-coded 3 apps specifically for my needs. They'll never get released publicly, because they'd need polish and features that I don't care about personally. They potentially replace some SaaS too.
- figers 11mo ago
  What did the 3 apps do? I did the same for one app to give me my speed in MPH as huge text as a HUD in a car
  - viraptor 11mo ago
    Very specific training app for guitar with spaced repetition, automated message forwarder (all good ones demand subscription), and something very specific to me.
- tjr 11mo ago
  In context, it sounds like you are saying you used AI to make these three applications? Why can't AI add the polish and features also?
  - viraptor 11mo ago
    It can. It's just not needed for my own apps. It would be needed for a public release and I'm just... not interested in that enough. It would cost me time and likely never get enough return.

wotWhytho 11mo ago

[dead]

jayd16 11mo ago

I mean, we have had the tech to crank out some little app for a long time. The point of the Saas used to be that you had a neck to strangle when things went south. I guess these days that's just impossible anyhow and the prices aren't worth it so we're rediscovering that software can be made instead of bought? There have been a lot of little blogs about "home cooking" style apps that you make for yourself. Maybe AI is the microwave meal version.

phantasmish 11mo ago

Something weird happened to software after the 90s or so. You had all these small-by-modern-standards teams (though sometimes in large companies) putting out desktop applications, sometimes on multiple platforms, with shitloads of features. On fairly tight schedules. To address markets that are itty-bitty by modern standards. Now people are like “We’ll need (3x the personnel) and (2x the time) and you can forget about native, it’s webshit or else you can double those figures… for one platform. What’s that? Your TAM is only (the size of the entire home PC market circa 1995)? Oh forget about it then, you’ll never get funded” It seems like we’ve gotten far less efficient. I’m skeptical this problem has to do with code-writing, and so am skeptical that LLMs are going to even get us back to our former baseline.

mattgreenrocks 11mo ago
Yep. Software construction was branded a team sport. Hence, social coding, tool quality being considered more important (good thing for sure), and, arguably, less emphasis on individual skill and agency. This was in service of a time when tech was the great equalizer, powered by ZIRP. It also dovetailed perfectly with middle managers needing more reports in fast growing tech companies. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back from the overly collective focus we had during the 2010s.
- RajT88 11mo ago
  I would make the case as well that software underwent demographic shift as the demand skyrocketed and the barriers to entering the profession with languages and tooling dropped. 80's/90's dev teams were more weird nerds with very high dedication to their craft. Today devs are much more regular people, but there are a lot more of them.
  - mattgreenrocks 11mo ago
    Definitely. There’s pluses and minuses to that shift.
dghlsakjg 11mo ago

zahlman 11mo ago

PaulHoule 11mo ago
In fact that is where AI could win. An in house system only needs to serve the needs of one customer whereas the SAAS has to be built for the imagined needs of many customers —- when you’re lucky you can “build one to throw away” and not throw it away.
- zahlman 11mo ago
  Yes, that was my point. It gets hard for the new SaaS competitors to "undercut" the established players when the underlying market disappears.

socketcluster 11mo ago

This is assuming the marketplace works perfectly... Which is an incorrect assumption. Reality is that the marketplace is highly controlled by algorithms. New platforms will struggle to get exposure... No exposure, no credibility, no word of mouth, no users, catch 22... You think the big players will allow small SaaS projects to gain traction on their platforms? Have you seen how centralized the Internet is these days? Have you seen how afraid people are of betting on no-name platforms? If they choose the wrong no-name platforms and tools, they will lose their (increasingly precious) jobs. As the saying goes "Nobody lost their job for choosing IBM." As for B2C; it's dead, consumers don't have money and will have less of it in the future; the mass-market game is over. My bet is if there were a lot of great apps being built, even excellent quality, nobody would even hear about them. The big players would copy them before anyone even found out about them. IMO, the market is not even a playing field anymore, this is why everyone is getting into politics now, though politics is also somewhat monopolized, there is still more potential for success because there is such an abundance of dissatisfied people willing to look outside of mainstream channels. It's much easier to sell political ideologies than to sell products.

acessoproibido 11mo ago
"Everything is controlled by algorithms" doesnt make any sense - its like saying everything is subject to entropy - well sure but also what?
- socketcluster 11mo ago
  It's not the same because who controls the algorithms matters here. The algorithms work for some entities and against other entities. They are not neutral at all. They are aligned through shared monetary incentives, so well aligned that they would probably be less aligned if it was a literal conspiracy. TBH. I'm kind of shocked I still have to explain this. When you get on the wrong side of the algorithms you will understand, you will understand viscerally. And I do mean 'when' not 'if'. Maybe the algorithms have been working for you so far and you're not feeling them but just give it a few years. Unfortunately, once you understand, you won't have a voice anymore and those still in the game won't have enough empathy to help you.

almosthere 11mo ago

LLMs, long term, have killed most SaaS. Most SaaS used to be killed by bespoke software engineers that would build some custom thing, and it was integrated perfectly into the legacy system. Then all those people decided to be managers and go on "i dont care" autopilot mode and hired a bunch of teens that still do care, to some extent. But those teens suck at it, and the old guys just don't really care anymore. Now with agentic code, instead of "buy splunk" or "buy jira" or whatever thing they are trying to do, they have one of those "teens now in their mid twenties" that are SUPER excited about Agentic flows, either write an agentic tool or simply use an agentic tool to code up the 300 lines of code that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk or whatever. Since most people only use 5% of the total features of any product, there's no reason to buy tools anymore, just build it for a fraction of the cost. I don't know if the above is where we're at right now, but it's coming.

actionfromafar 11mo ago
Creating code sprawl, weird ball of twine systems etc until someone says, enough, we will just buy this SAAS solution which integrates it all. Rinse, repeat.
myk9001 11mo ago
> that would replace their need for a Jira or a Splunk Or a JS runtime like Bun. Oh, wait...
roncesvalles 11mo ago
Nobody is replacing Jira or Splunk with anything coming out of an LLM.
bmikaili 11mo ago
Yeahh, right, I'm not sure splunk is that simple.
heavyset_go 11mo ago
This is "people will 3D print cars in their garage, manufacturing is over!" level of hype

raw_anon_1111 11mo ago

Well, because no self interested decision maker in any company of size is going to ever trust their business to an unknown company run by a one person operation. And why would the benefits of being able to code faster accrue to a small independent developer over a large company that already has an established reputation and a customer base? “No one ever got fired for buying Salesforce”. I once had influence over the buying decision to support an implementation I was leading. I found this perfect SaaS product by a one man shop who was local. Working with my CTO and lawyers, we made a proposal to the founder. We would sign with him and be 70% of his post signing revenue if he agreed to give us our own self hosted instance and put his latest code in escrow with a third party (Green Mountain) and we would have non exclusive rights to use the code (but not distribute it) under certain circumstances.

pdimitar 11mo ago
Did he agree?
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  Yep and he agreed to let us verify that the code he installed on our servers were built from source and the same code was in escrow at Green Mountain. The terms weren’t as onerous as it sounds. It was basically if he stopped supporting it or got hit by a bus, we would get access.
benjiro 11mo ago
He never said that companies will trust a one man shop. His point was clearly that people and companies will make products designed for themselves, using LLMs. Why pay for a piece of software that you really only use 5% of all the features, and still may need customizations for. Vs just internally have somebody code a custom solution for your company. The only benefit of a outside solution is that you can blame a outsider. Internal solution used to be bad because if the person with the knowledge of the codebase left, you ended up screwed. But with LLMs and "vibe" coding, there becomes a disconnect between the code and whoever wrote it. Making it easier to later make modifications on that same codebase, using ... LLMs.

eirikbakke 11mo ago

I'd also expect to see a lot more AI-generated PRs on open source projects. (Or at least AI-assisted to the point where the author feels like they should mention it.)

vidarh 11mo ago

For a lot of SaaS projects building the software is the simplest part.

roncesvalles 11mo ago

There is also the missing explosion of App Store app submissions and other such metrics.

trollbridge 11mo ago

Astute observation. From where I sit, the market (at least for business software; I am not very familiar with the consumer market) seems to be wide open, and businesses in the 5 - 200 employee range seem to be particularly underserved. The marketplace for software for single-owner shops or 1-5 employee size places does seem to be quite strong, and then there's enterprise software, but small business seems to have a software marketplace that is atrociously bad. Here is the typical thing a prospective customer asks me to fix for them: - They are using some piece of software that is essential to their business. - There really isn't much good competition for that software, and it would be a large cost to convert to another platform that also has all the same downsides below. - The software vendor used to be great, but seems to have been sold several times. - The vendor has recently switched to a subscription-only model and keeps on raising subscription prices in the 12% or so range every year, and the cost of this has started to become noticeable in their budget. - They were accustomed to software being a capital investment with a modest ongoing cost for support, but now it's becoming just an expense. - Quality has taken a nosedive and in particular new features are buggy. Promised integrations seem quite lacking and new features/integrations feel bolted on. - Support is difficult to get ahold of, and the formerly good telephone support then got replaced by being asked to open tickets/emails and now has been replaced by an AI chatbot frontend before they can even open a ticket. Most issues go unresolved. There are literally millions of software packages in existence, and the bulk of them by numbers are niche products used by small businesses. (Think of a software package which solely exists to help you write custom enhancements for another software package which is used by a specific sector of the furniture-manufacturing business, to get an example.) The quality of this sector is not improving. This is a field that is absolutely ripe for improvement. If the cost of building software really were dropping 90%, this would be a very easy field to move into and simply start offering for $6,000 a year the product that your competition is charging $12,000 a year for, for an inferior product. Before you bring up things like vendor lock-in or the pain of migration... why can't you write software to solve those problems, too? After all, the cost of writing a migration tool should be 90% cheaper now, too, right?

pizzafeelsright 11mo ago

I found that the time (1-4 hours) is enough to build any SaaS for myself

Kerrick 11mo ago

"We use AI to build the tools because we use them in cursor or Visual Studio or code or wherever else people are making our stuff. I use AI a bunch." https://37signals.com/podcast/listener-questions/ https://37signals.com/podcast/listener-questions/ "Today we’re introducing Fizzy. Kanban as it should be, not as it has been. [...] we’ll host your account for just $20/month for unlimited cards and unlimited users. [...] And here’s a surprise... Fizzy is open source! If you’d prefer not to pay us, or you want to customize Fizzy for your own use, you can run it yourself for free forever." https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291 https://x.com/jasonfried/status/1995886683028685291

weird-eye-issue 11mo ago

Your comment contradicts itself You are saying there aren't more low cost alternatives coming out You also say writing code isn't the big problem (which I agree with) But both can be true and in fact the reason is because the second is true! You aren't seeing the alternate because marketing is hard. People generally don't care about new products and aren't willing to save a little bit of money risking their time on something new

Madmallard 11mo ago

barrier to entry is more problematic than anything else make something decent in the same space as an existing mega-corporation's tool? prepare to get sued and they also steal your good ideas and implement them themselves because you don't have the money to fight them in court

codyswann 11mo ago

Code isn't the moat and it hasn't been for quite some time. Data is the moat.

theshrike79 11mo ago

No no, that's not how it works. The crap I build _replaces_ someone else's SaaS (or free open source) product. They solve my exact problem and nothing else and they follow the ways I like to use my software, with no fancy Dockerised WebUIs etc. I have exactly zero intention of putting any of that shit out there as any kind of service with user accounts and billing and all of the associated stress. A few of them might be something I could sell as a SaaS offering, but I'm not interested in it at all. Most of them are on my Github though for anyone to get and use as they see fit, but then it's up to them if the vibe coded program does something it shouldn't :)

mbesto 11mo ago

> Had the cost of building custom software dropped 90%, we would be seeing a flurry of low-cost, decent-quality SaaS offering all over the marketplace, possibly undercutting some established players. Aha. Are developers finally realizing that just writing code doesn't make a business? We actually have a ton of SaaS companies being born right now but they're not making headway, because functionality and good code don't necessarily mean good businesses. Building a business is hard.

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pllbnk 11mo ago

I have seen it commonly cited (although haven't bothered to check the actual sources, mostly because I believe they should be taken with a grain of salt) that developers spend somewhere in the ballpark of 50-60% of their time doing "coding work" - that is writing the code, thinking about the solution in terms of technical aspects, reading code reviews. The rest are meetings, coordination, administrative tasks, being blocked or whatever else you can think of. Even if, wishfully thinking, the value of the act of "coding work" fell by 90%, the act of doing "software engineering" work would still cost no less than 50% of what it currently does. Headlines like these are alarmist and have little substance. Edit: I also feel stumped why so many people give in to this hype that LLMs are good at coding when they can't even do seemingly simple tasks of plain English language summarization accurately as evidenced in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrwJgDHJJoE. If the AI summarizes the code in its own context incorrectly then it will not be able to write it correctly either.

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burnerRhodov2 11mo ago

from my perspective, this is exactly where we are. Have you ever watched starter story? There's hundreds of people with 5,6+ apps making 100k+ MRR. The VC model is broken because of it.