14 ms·

AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

• MangoToupe 10mo ago
  > If I want an internal dashboard, I don't even think that Retool or similar would make it easier. I just build the dashboard Oh, child.... building is easy. Coordinating maintenance of the tool across a non-technical team is hell.
  • toomuchtodo 10mo ago
    Indeed, wisdom is being able to see the lifecycle like a time knife and making favorable decisions based on past experiences (ie getting the most value from what may need to be built and operated for its lifetime). Writing code is easy, managing a living codebase with ever changing business requirements and stakeholders is hard.
    • lwhi 10mo ago
      Exactly. Corporations think in terms of risk. Second only to providing a useful function, a successful SaaS app will have been built to mitigate risk well. It's not going to be easy to meet these requirements without prior knowledge and experience.
• scotty79 10mo ago
  Let me give you an example of my workflow from tonight: 1. I had two text documents containing plain text to compare. One with minor edits (done by AI). 2. I wanted to see what AI changed in my text. 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. I searched google for "text comparison tool but not line-based" 4. As second search result it found me https://www.diffchecker.com/ https://www.diffchecker.com/ (It's a SaaS, right?) 5. Initially it did equally bad job but I noticed it had a switch "Real-time diff" which did exactly what I wanted. 6. I got curious what is this algorithm. So I asked Gemini with "Deep Research" mode: "The website https://www.diffchecker.com/ https://www.diffchecker.com/ uses a diff algorithm they call real-time diff. It works really good for reformatted and corrected text documents. I'd like to know what is this algorithm and if there's any other software, preferably open-source that uses it." 7. As a first suggestion it listed diff-match-patch from Google. It had Python package. 8. I started Antigravity in a new folder, ran uv init. Then I prompted the following: "Write a commandline tool that uses https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Language:-Python https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Language:-Py... to generate diff of two files and presents it as side by side comparison in generated html file." [...] "I installed the missing dependance for you. Please continue." - I noticed it doesn't use uv for installing dependencies so I interrupted and did it myself. [...] "This project uses uv. To run python code use uv run python test_diff.py" - I noticed it still doesn't use uv for running the code so its testing fails. [...] "Semantic cleanup is important, please use it." - Things started to show up but it looked like linear diff. I noticed it had a call to semantic cleanup method commented out so I thought it might help if I push it in that direction. [...] "also display the complete, raw diff object below the table" - the display of the diff still didn't seem good so I got curious if it's the problem with the diffing code or the display code [...] "I don't see the contents of the object, just text {diffs}" - it made a silly mistake by outputting template variable instead of actual object. [...] "While comparing larger files 1.txt and 2.txt I notice that the diff is not very granular. Text changed just slightly but the diff looks like deleting nearly all the lines of the document, and inserting completely fresh ones. Can you force diff library to be more granular? You seem to be doing the right thing https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Line-or-Word-Diffs https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch/wiki/Line-or-Word... but the outcome is not good. Maybe there's some better matching algoritm in the library?" - it seemed that while on small tests that Antigravity made itself it worked decently but on the texts that I actually wanted to compare was still terrible although I've seen glimpses of hope because some spots were diffed more granularly. I inspected the code and it seemed to be doing character level diffing as per diff-match-patch example. While it processed this prompt I was searching for solution myself by clicking around diff-match-patch repo and demos. I found a potential solution by adjusting cleanup, but it actually solved the problem by itself by ditching the character level diffing (which I'm not sure I would have come up with at this point). Diffed object looked great but as I compared the result to https://www.diffchecker.com/ https://www.diffchecker.com/ output it seemed that they did one minor thing about formatting better. [...] "Could you use rowspan so that rows on one side that are equivalent to multiple rows on the other side would have same height as the rows on the other side they are equivalent to?" - I felt very clumsily trying to phrase it and I wasn't sure if Antigravity will understand. But it did and executed perfectly. I didn't have to revert a single prompt and interrupted just two times at the beginning. After a while I added watch functionality with a single prompt: "I'd like to add a -w (--watch) flag that will cause the program to keep running and monitor source files to diff and update the output diff file whenever they change." [...] So I basically went from having two very similar text files and knowing very little about diffing to knowing a bit more and having my own local tool that let's me compare texts in satisfying manner, with beautiful highlighting and formatting, that I can extend or modify however I like, that mirrors interesting part of the functionality of the best tool I found online. And all of that in the time span shorter than it took me to write this comment (at least the coding part was, I followed few wrong paths during my search for a bit). My experience tells me that even if I could replicate what I did today (keeping motivated is an issue for me), it would most likely be multi-day project full of frustration and hunting small errors and venturing into wrong paths. Python isn't even my strongest language. Instead it was a pleasant and fun evening with occasional jaw drops and feeling so blessed that I live in SciFi times I read about as a kid (and adult).
  • giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    You could have also ran diff on both files and gotten a reasonable diff.
    • scotty79 10mo ago
      I ran kompare, kdiff3, meld, git diff --no-index (--patience, --word-diff, --histogram) and it was all useless.
  • austinjp 10mo ago
    > 3. I tried the usual diff tools. They diffed line by line and result was terrible. Um. I don't want to be That Guy (shouting at clouds, or at kids to get off my lawn or whatever) but ... what "usual diff" tools did you use? Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades. There is word-level diff, for example. Was that not good enough? Or delta [0] perhaps? [0] https://github.com/dandavison/delta https://github.com/dandavison/delta
    • scotty79 10mo ago
      kompare, kdiff3, meld, git diff --no-index (--patience, --word-diff, --histogram) All weren't remotely close to what I wanted. On first glance delta is also doing completely standard thing. But I can't rule out that there are some flags to coerce it to do the thing I wanted. But searching for tools and flag combinations is not that fun and success is not guaranteed. Also I found a (SaaS) tool and a flag there that did exactly what I wanted. Just decided to make my own local tool afterwards for better control. With an agent. > Because comparing two text files with minor edits is exactly what diff-related tools have excelled at for decades. True. And I ended up using this excellent Google diff-match-patch library for diffing. AI didn't write me a diffing algorithm. Just everything around it to make a convenient tool for me. Most tools are for source code and treat end lines as a very strong structural feature of compared texts. I needed something that doesn't care about end lines all that much and can show me which characters changed between one line of one file and five lines it was split into in the second file.
• redwood 10mo ago
  Jamin Ball had a better take on Clouded Judgement https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-121225-long-live https://cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-judgement-12... "Long Live Systems of Record"
  • lwhi 10mo ago
    This was a good read.
  • bigtones 10mo ago
    Yeah I think that is a much more accurate take on the same subject.
  • returnInfinity 10mo ago
    This is the right take Also maintaining a software is pain Also for perpetually small companies, its now easy to build simple scripts to be achieve some productivity gains.
• yellow_lead 10mo ago
  Another post with no data, but plenty of personal vibes. > The signals I'm seeing Here are the signals: > If I want an internal dashboard... > If I need to re-encode videos... > This is even more pronounced for less pure software development tasks. For example, I've had Gemini 3 produce really high quality UI/UX mockups and wireframes > people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies Who are "people"?
  • ares623 10mo ago
    Vibes can move billions of dollars from someone else's retirement money
  • samdoesnothing 10mo ago
    > For example, I've had Gemini 3 produce really high quality UI/UX mockups and wireframes Is the author a competent UX designer who can actually judge the quality of the UX and mockups? > I write about web development, AI tooling, performance optimization, and building better software. I also teach workshops on AI development for engineering teams. I've worked on dozens of enterprise software projects and enjoy the intersection between commercial success and pragmatic technical excellence. Nope.
• ares623 10mo ago
  Maybe someday we'll see job postings for maintaining these in-house SaaS tools. And someday someday, we'll see these in-house SaaS tools being consolidated as its own separate product. Wait what.
  • Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    Hey lets hope maybe people will open source the product too :D
  • sleazebreeze 10mo ago
    and around and around we'll go again!
• Oarch 10mo ago
  Earlier this year I thought that rare proprietary knowledge and IP was a safe haven from AI, since LLMs can only scrub public data. Then it dawned on me how many companies are deeply integrating Copilot into their everyday workflows. It's the perfect Trojan Horse.
  • Aurornis 10mo ago
    Using an LLM on data does not ingest that data into the training corpus. LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. None of the mainstream paid services ingest operating data into their training sets. You will find a lot of conspiracy theories claiming that companies are saying one thing but secretly stealing your data, of course.
    • leptons 10mo ago
      > LLMs don’t “learn” from the information they operate on, contrary to what a lot of people assume. Nothing is really preventing this though. AI companies have already proven they will ignore copyright and any other legal nuisance so they can train models.
      • lioeters 10mo ago
        They're already using synthetic data generated by LLMs to further train LLMs. Of course they will not hesitate to feed "anonymized" data generated by user interactions. Who's going to stop them? Or even prove that it's happening. These companies have already been allowed to violate copyright and privacy on a historic global scale.
      • Archelaos 10mo ago
        How should they dinstinguish between real and fake data? It would be far to easy to pollute their models with nonesense.
        • leptons 10mo ago
          I have no doubt that Microsoft has already classified the nature of my work and quality of my code. Of course it's probably "anonymized". But there's no doubt in my mind that they are watching everything you give them access to, make no mistake.
• joeyguerra 10mo ago
  I’m always skeptical when I see (or say for that matter) phrases that start with “just”.
• jackschultz 10mo ago
  Another video about this today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bg0Q1enwS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bg0Q1enwS4 Summary is that for agents to work well they need clear vision into all things, and putting the data behind a gui or not well maintained CLI is a hinderance. Combined with how structured crud apps are an how the agents can for sure write good crud apps, no reason to not have your own. Wins all around with not paying for it, having a better understanding of processes, and letting agents handle workflows.
• bgwalter 10mo ago
  The author teaches workshops for "AI" development. Next commercial please.
  • MyFirstSass 10mo ago
    Hackernews seems completely astroturfed in the last weeks. It's not the hackernews i knew even 3 years ago anymore and i'm seriously close to just ditching the site after 15+ years of use. I use AI heavily but everyday there's crazy optimistic almost manic posts about how AI is going to take over various sectors that are completely ludicrous - and they are all filled with comments from bizarrely optimistic people that have seemingly no knowledge of how software is actually run or built, ie. it's the human organisational, research and management elements that are the hard parts, something AI can't do in any shape or form at the moment for any complex or even small company.
    • bybuybye 10mo ago
      [dead]
• Starlevel004 10mo ago
  Oh no! Anyway.
• arealaccount 10mo ago
  The where this doesn’t work section is chefs kiss - anything that requires very high uptime -very high volume systems and data lakes -software with significant network effects -companies that have proprietary datasets -regulation and compliance is still very important
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
• weitendorf 10mo ago
  This is why I started working on an open source, generic protobuf sqlite ORM + CRUD server (with search/filtering) + type/service registry + grpc mesh, recently: https://github.com/accretional/collector https://github.com/accretional/collector Note: collector's docs are mostly from LLMs, partially because it's more of a framework for tool-calling LLMs than humans Then this project lets you generate static sites from svelte components (matches protobuf structures) and markdown (documentation) and global template variables: https://github.com/accretional/statue https://github.com/accretional/statue A lot of the SaaS ecosystem actually has rather simple domain logic and oftentimes doesn't even model data very well, or at least not in a way that matches their clients/users mental models or application logic. A lot of the value is in integrations, or the data/scaling, or the marketing and developer experience, or some kind of expertise in actually properly providing a simple interface to a complex solution. So why not just create a compact universal representation of that? Because it's not so big a leap to go beyond eating SaaS to eating integrations, migration costs/bad moats, and the marketing/documentation/wrapper.
• _pdp_ 10mo ago
  I often give the follow analogy which I think is a good proxy to what is going on. Spreadsheets! They are everywhere. In fact, they are so abundant these days that that many are spawned for a quick job and immediately discarded. In fact, the cost of having these spreadsheets is practically zero so in many cases one may find themselves having hundreds if not thousands of them sitting around with no indication to ever being deleted. Spreadsheets are also personal and annoying especially when forced upon you (since you did not make it yourself). Spreadsheets are also programming for non-programmers. These new vibe-coded tools are essentially the new spreadsheets. They are useful,... for 5 minutes. They are also easily forgettable. They are also personal (for the person who made them) and hated (by everyone else). I have no doubt in my mind that organisation will start using more and more of these new types of software to automate repetitive tasks, improve existing processes and so on but ultimately, apart from perhaps just a few, none will replace existing, purpose-built systems. Ultimately you can make your own pretty dashboard that nobody else will see or use because when the cost of production is so low your users will want to create their own version because they would think they could do better. After all, how hard is to prompt harder then the previous person? Also, do you really think that SaaS companies are not deploying AI themselves? It is practically an arms race: the non-expert plus some AI vs 10 specialist developers plus their AIs doing this all day long. Who is going to have the upper-hand?
  • matwood 10mo ago
    I mostly agree. What it does do is raise the bar for a viable SaaS, and seeing some examples elsewhere in this thread, that’s a good thing. I’d also add a number of the vibe tools tech adjacent people on my team have made are used and liked by the team. Even engineering likes them because it frees up their time to work on customer facing things.
  • theshrike79 10mo ago
    There are SO MANY Excel sheets someone automated a decade+ ago still used in essential parts of the government and big corporations. Nobody knows how they work, very few have the skills or time to edit them or check them. People just use them for the convenience. The magic sauce of Excel is that it's free an scriptable (programmable even). If you want a SaaS, you need to involve IT, Legal, your supervisors and it's a whole-ass thing of contracts and shit. Excel? It's just there. There are so many stories and anecdotes of people being in stupid data entry jobs, getting bored and finding out their whole job can be automated with a single smartly done Excel sheet. Then they press F9 once per day and do something else for the rest of the time =) And just because, my main gripe about Excel: there are no unit tests or validators for it. There's no easy way to programmatically confirm that Cell C5 has the same formula as C875 If (when?) people start AI-coding the things they used to use Excel for, we might get some actual tests and validation to confirm what the code is supposed to actually happens.
• NikolaNovak 10mo ago
  I get and agree with a lot of skepticism (and I get where ad-hominem attacks come from:). I have AI shoved my throat at work and at home 24x7 and most of it not for my benefit, and the writer doesn't out as much rigor into writing as might be beneficial. At the same time, to the core theme of the article - do any of us think a small sassy SaaS like Bingo card creator could take off now? :-) https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_software_business https://training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/selling_s...
• blazespin 10mo ago
  There is a significant risk of uncertainty in all of this, the most damaging aspect really. If AI improves, and it is threatening to, then growth in SaaS may decline to a point where investing in it needs to be reconsidered. The problem is, nobody knows how much and how fast AI will improve or how much it will cost if it does. That uncertainty alone is very problematic and I think is being underestimated in terms of its impact on everything it can potentially touch. For now though, I've seen a wall form in benchmarks like swe-rebench and swebench pro. Greenfield is expanding, but maintenance is still a problem. I think AI needs to get much better at maintenance before serious companies can choose build over buy for anything but the most trivial apps.
• hurturue 10mo ago
  Related, Microsoft CEO said that soon the biggest client of Microsoft is going to be agents, not humans.
  • agumonkey 10mo ago
    agent economy .. that's a fun thought
• hyperpape 10mo ago
  Note that the author does not mention a single specific SaaS subscription he’s cancelled or seen a team cancel. The only named product was Retool.
  • linsomniac 10mo ago
    We just had a $240/year renewal for teamretro.com come due, and while TeamRetro has a lot of components, we are only using the retro and ice breaker components. So I gave Claude Code a couple of prompts and I now have a couple static HTML pages that do the ice breaker (using local storage) and the retro (using a Google sheet as the storage backend, largely because it mimics our pre-teamretro process). It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro
    • nop_slide 10mo ago
      Or just don’t do retro and save even more time and money!
    • matwood 10mo ago
      How is teamretro a product to begin with? I feel like these SaaS’s exploded like js libraries.
      • linsomniac 10mo ago
        It is fine. We already had a retro process we were using, and teamretro didn't really enable us to change or improve our process so much as just continue doing our existing process. It is a solid product, but honestly we just used a google sheet prior to it and that worked fine as well.
    • lelanthran 10mo ago
      > It took me no more than 2 hours to put those together. We didn't renew our TeamRetro Okay, so two hours with an LLM vs maybe 2.5 days without an LLM in the best-case scenario (i.e. LLMs gave you a 10x boost. I would expect it to be less than that though, like maybe a 2x boost) - it sounds like it was always pretty cheap to replace the SaaS, but the business didn't do it. TBH, the arguments were never "It would take too long to do ourselves", it was always "but then we'd have to maintain it ourselves". The place I am consulting at now just moved (i.e. a month ago) from their in-house built ticketing system ($0/m as it had not needed maintenance for over a year) to Jira (~$2k/m). In this specific case, it was literally 0 hours to avoid paying the SaaS, and they still moved, because they wanted some modern features (billing for time on support calls, etc) and figured that rather than update their in-house system to add support hours costing (a day, at most) they may as well move to a system that already had it. (Joke's on them though - the Jira solution for support hours costing is not near the level of granularity they need, even with multiple paid plugins). Once again, companies aren't using SaaS because it's cheaper or quicker; they could already quickly replace their SaaS with in-house.
• andy_ppp 10mo ago
  I’m currently working on an in house ERP and inventory system for a specific kind of business. With very few people you can now instead of paying loads of money for some off the shelf solution to your software needs get something completely bespoke to your business. I think AI enables the age of boutique software that works fantastically for businesses, agencies will need to dramatically reduce their price to compete with in house teams. I’m pretty certain AI quadruples my output at least and facilitates fixing, improving and upgrading poor quality inherited software much better than in the past. Why pay for SaaS when you can build something “good enough” in a week or two? You also get exactly what you want rather than some £300k per year CRM that will double or treble in price and never quite be what you wanted.
  • _pdp_ 10mo ago
    This is only true if you assume that you are producing the same amount of code as today. Though, AI ultimately will produce more code which will require higher maintenance. Your internal team will need to scale up due to the the amount of code they need to maintain. Your security team will have more work to do as well because they will need to review more code which will require scaling that team as well. Your infrastructure costs will start adding up and if you have any DevOps they will need scaling too. Soon or later the CTO will be dictating which projects can be vibe coded which ones make sense to buy. SaaS benefits from network effects - your internal tools don't. So overall SaaS is cheaper. The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs. Most of it is salaries. The situation you are describing the kind of dead spiral many companies will get into and that will be their downfall not salvation.
    • physicsguy 10mo ago
      > Soon or later the CTO will be dictating which projects can be vibe coded which ones make sense to buy. A lot of the SaaS target companies won't even have a CTO
    • theshrike79 10mo ago
      > The reality is that software license costs is a tiny fraction of total business costs Yes and no. If someone is controlling the SaaS selection, then this is true. But I've seen startup phase companies with multiple slightly overlapping SaaS subscriptions (Linear + Trello + Asana for example), just because one PM prefers one over the other. Then people have bought full-ass SaaS costing 50-100€/month for a single task it does. I'd describe the "Use AI to make bespoke software" as the solution you use to round out the sharp edges in software (and licensing). The survey SaaS wants extra money to connect to service Y, but their API is free? Fire up Claude and write the connector ourselves. We don't want to build and support a full survey tool, but API glue is fine. Or someone is doing manual work because vendor A wants their data in format X and vendor B only accepts format Y. Out comes Claude and we create a tool that provides both outputs at the same time. (This was actually written by a copywriter on their spare time, just because they got annoyed with extra busywork. Now it's used by a half-dozen people)
• henning 10mo ago
  Ah, yes. If the thing that is false is true, all kinds of interesting things happen! For example, if I became the queen of France, I could make people do silly dances! That is an interesting hypothesis that could play out in my imaginary world! SaaS maintenance isn't about upgrading packages, it's about accountability and a point of contact when something breaks along with SLAs and contractual obligations. It isn't because building a kanban board app is hard. Someone else deals with provisioning, alerts, compliance, etc. and they are a real human who cannot hallucinate that the issue has been fixed when it hasn't. Depending on the contract and how it is breached, you can potentially take them to court and sue them to recover money lost as a result of their malpractice. None of that applies to a neural network that misreads the alert, does something completely wrong, then concludes the issue is fixed the way the latest models constantly do when I use them.
• m-hodges 10mo ago
  Man, AI tools are going to get so expensive, aren’t they.
• yieldcrv 10mo ago
  Yeah, when everyone can create a SaaS, noone will and will create the boutique thing you’re selling for their own purpose
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• shermantanktop 10mo ago
  The real question isn’t whether we’ll run out of SaaS customers, it’s whether we’ll run out of new problems that can be solved by the current set of tools. I doubt it, it’d be a historical first in the modern era. But the solutions may move closer to the companies with the problems. More in-house, fewer intermediaries.
• mikert89 10mo ago
  "It was always possible to clone software, but doing so was costly and time consuming, and the clone would need to be much cheaper, making any such venture financially non-viable. With AI, that equation is now changing. I anticipate that within 5 years autonomous coding agents will be able to rapidly and cheaply clone almost any existing software, while also providing hosting, operations, and support, all for a small fraction of the cost. This will inevitably destroy many existing businesses. In order to survive, businesses will require strong network effects (e.g. marketplaces) or extremely deep data/compute moats. There will also be many new opportunities created by the very low cost of software. What could you build if it were possible to create software 1000x faster and cheaper?" Paul Bucheit https://x.com/paultoo/status/1999245292294803914 https://x.com/paultoo/status/1999245292294803914
• lateforwork 10mo ago
  This article made no sense to me. It is talking about AI-generated code eating SaaS. That's not what is going to replace SaaS. When AI is able to do the job itself — without generating code — that's what is going to replace SaaS. AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.
  • mjr00 10mo ago
    > AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, ensure security, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company. Yeah it's a fundamental misunderstanding of economies of scale. If you build an in-house app that does X, you incur 100% of the maintenance costs. If you're subscribed to a SaaS product, you're paying for 1/N % of the maintenance costs, where N is the number of customers. I only see AI-generated code replacing things that never made sense as a SaaS anyway. It's telling the author's only concrete example of a replaced SaaS product is Retool, which is much less about SaaS and much more about a product that's been fundamentally deprecated. Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira ("just an issue tracker") and Github Enterprise ("just a browser-based wrapper over git") clones.
    • sayamqazi 10mo ago
      "Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira". This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it. I know this is not happening for the next few decades or so.
      • mjr00 10mo ago
        > This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it. The difference is that an AI-coded internal Jira clone is something that could realistically happen today. Vague notions of AI "understanding" anything are not currently realistic and won't be for an indeterminate amount of time, which could mean next year, 30 years from now, or never. I don't consider that worth discussing.
• dylanzhangdev 10mo ago
  I think the biggest impact will be on SaaS products from startups and side projects. People will think, "I can build something myself with the help of AI, so why should I pay to try your unfinished product?" The barrier to entry has become higher, requiring a more complete product.
• innagadadavida 10mo ago
  The ffmpeg wrapper use case is interesting. Reusing some core software for speed and reliability but to get better usability by leveraging LLMs seems like the sweet spot for SaaS use cases. A lot of these CRM products are basically wrappers around DBs and sheets like core products with terrible UI. The new breed will solve the UI ease of use issues.
• zenethian 10mo ago
  Another big long AI-generated article. Sheesh. Bonus points for replacing the emdashes with regular hyphens to try to cover it up.
• rester324 10mo ago
  > Agents don't leave How wrong the author is about that! IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering
  • theshrike79 10mo ago
    But local agents will still keep working. Of course they're not as poweful as an acre of industrially cooled compute power, but still a massive improvement over "Intellisense" and code snippets. You're 100% right though, you shouldn't build your business on top of an AI service and not have a plan what to do _when_ it either goes away or just prices itself out. It's a massive bubble where money is just moving in a circle.
  • lelanthran 10mo ago
    > IMO As soon as the bubble bursts, which is already evident and imminent, these agents will raise their subscription fees to ridiculous amounts. And when that happens, entire organizations will abandon them and return to good ol' human engineering It's worse than you state; a primary premise of the current AI expansion and investment, continuously repeated, is that computational resources are increasing for the same price-point. So tell me, when we have these hardware gains in 5 years, why the fuck would I pay for fractionally better output on a cloud subscription when I could run on-prem GPUs for a fraction of what the actual subscription would be, giving me 24x7 agents working with no limit? Current highly-invested AI providers are token providers - they are sitting at the bottom of the value-chain. They are trying to climb the value-chain, but the real value is in the models, and since all models have mostly converged on the same performance, running your own gives a very tiny drop in value. Their problem is that, even at $200/m, it is not feasible to offer 24x7 access to the models - that max subscription has tiny limits: on that subscription you most definitely are not enabling even a single agent to run f/time. You might get 3 hours per day, maybe. Best case, you get half a working day (4 hours), for five days. So double the subscription, and you're still looking at only a single simply agent that you can run f/time for $400/m. For collaborating agents, you'll have, what, 4 - 5 diving into a large task in parallel? That's maybe $1600/m - $2000/m to solve tasks. You still have to pay the (increasingly incompetent) human operator to manage them. That sort of workflow is what is being sold as the vision, and yet that will only be economically viable if you're self-hosting your own model.
• lil-lugger 10mo ago
  AI coding IS SaaS. Claude Code is a subscription service I pay to create the exact, niche, I need you to build a form that submits a blog post to Wordpress here’s my api key, here’s the word doc format it comes in, I’ll paste it in the chat and you make a paste from word button so I don’t have to manually enter the form and it works first try. That is the definition of software as a service. And it’s mine and it’s exactly what I need. Tomorrow I’ll need something else…
• jonathanharel 10mo ago
  Really interesting read, thank you! I'm currently working for a very traditional SaaS company (let's call us FooBar for the discussion), and I can say that this fear is very real. We talk a lot about the "FooBar killer" which is a theoretical startup company working right now on a better solution than ours. We know that there are a few of those and we even started working on one of our own exactly because of that. If you can't beat the "engineers with a spare Friday afternoon" you might as well join the attempt to replace you.
• benzible 10mo ago
  I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it. One gave up. The other's users tell us it's crap. We've lost zero paying subscribers to free internal alternatives. I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. We use agents heavily and ship faster than ever. We get a lot of feedback from users as to what the internal tech teams are shipping and based on this there's little evidence of any increase in velocity from them. The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building. A lot of the value in our product is in decisions users don't even know we made for them. Domain expertise + tight feedback loop with users can't be replicated by an internal developer in an afternoon.
  • Bombthecat 10mo ago
    Yap. AI and agents help to centralise, not decentralise
    • ben_w 10mo ago
      For now. I'm expecting this to be a bubble, and that bubble to burst; when it does, whatever's the top model at that point can likely still be distilled relatively cheaply like all other models have been. That, combined with my expectations that consumer RAM prices will return to their trend and decrease in price, means that if the bubble pops in the year 20XX, whatever performance was bleeding edge at the pop, runs on a high-end smartphone in the year 20XX+5.
      • j45 10mo ago
        The technology of LLMs is already applicable to valuable enough problems, therefore it won’t be a bubble. The world might be using a standard of AI needing to be a world beater to succeed but it’s simply not the case, AI a is software, and it can solve problems other software can’t.
• roncesvalles 10mo ago
  This is borderline schizophrenia. Firstly, nobody replaces something that works with something that might or might not work. Secondly, the way this person describes "agents" is not rooted in reality: >Agents don't leave. And with a well thought through AGENTS.md file, they can explain the codebase to anyone in the future. >What's going to be difficult to predict is how quickly agents can move up the value chain. I'm assuming that agents can't manage complex database clusters - but I'm not sure that's going to be the case for much longer. What in the world. And of course he's selling a course. This is the same business as those people sitting in Dubai selling $6000 options trading courses to anyone who believes their bullshit. The grifter economy around AI is in full swing like it was around blockchain/crypto in 2017-2020.
• firemelt 10mo ago
  that andressen horowitz article from 2011 is really beautiful
• gherkinnn 10mo ago
  Many SaaS are not products, but 1-2 features. And an LLM can generate a single-purpose script to replace that one feature you're using. Opus 4.5 does that very well. As for Retool, I see the several waves of low/no-code products, the current one being LLMs, as repeated attempts to get non technical idea-guys to build their ideas. Where they all fail, and this is fundamental to the problem they're trying to solve, is that idea-guys' ideas crack when meeting reality. And neither Retool nor LLM fix that.
  • physicsguy 10mo ago
    > is that idea-guys' ideas crack when meeting reality. This is definitely the hardest nut to crack. I worked on a product a while ago that needed to track maintenance periods on equipment quite carefully and then use that to filter data to provide insights about how it was performing. The 'user story' was light on detail. As we got into it, there were tons of questions about how to deal with source data that was often inconsistent or patchy, time zones became an issue because much of the data we received wasn't matched correctly to their local time (customers fault not ours) and our ideas guy just couldn't deal with it - "make it work" - when ultimately they were business questions that needed answering, not just pure software tasks. AI is so sycophantic it'd just go off and write something.
• jwr 10mo ago
  I am the founder of a niche SaaS (https://partsbox.com/ https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it. The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (please don't) and BOMs (bills of materials). The spreadsheet is my biggest competitor. I've been designing and building the software for 10 years now and most of the difficulty and complexity is not in the code. Coding is the last part, and the easiest one. The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity. Sadly, as I found out, once you spend a lot of time thinking and come up with a model, copycats will clone that (as well as they can, but superficially it will look similar).
  • ehnto 10mo ago
    > The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity. Which I don't think can be replaced by AI in a lot of cases. I think in the software world we are used to things being shared, open and easily knowable, but a great deal of industry and enterprise domain knowledge is locked up inside in companies and will not be in the training data. That's why it's such a big deal for an enterprise to have on prem tools, to avoid leaking industry processes and "secrets" (the secrets are boring, but still secrets). A little career advice in there too I guess. At least for now, you're a bit more secure as a developer in industries that aren't themselves software, is my guess.
    • jwr 10mo ago
      > Which I don't think can be replaced by AI in a lot of cases Yes. I try to visit my customers as often as I can, to learn how they work and to see the production processes on site. I consider it to be one of the most valuable things I can do for the future of my business.
  • a2code 10mo ago
    I have two tech q about partsbox. Why Clojure? Why not CL (lack of saas related-features)?
• physicsguy 10mo ago
  I think that there have always been a ton of SaaS things that are basically circular - startup company paying silly amounts per month to another startup company. I think the market for these things will drop as part of AI, but I think that was always going to be the case with higher interest rates as investors questioned the revenue/spend balance. When it comes to SaaS that's industry specific, I just don't see it'll be that much of a change any time soon. I've worked heavily in the engineering industry and the security requirements that get put upon anything are nuts. It is difficult to enter this market, ISO compliance is important, even being in the cloud is a barrier for some customers, and often the type that you have no choice but to contract with if you want to make a profit because of their outsized importance in the market. When I speak to customers, they actually quite often have tried to build something themselves. Usually it's been an intern or grad trying to make their life easier. Often it's spreadsheet based, but some go as far as knocking up little Python web apps. In one company I interned in they had a shadow PHP app. They often have a small 'data science' team that has struggled to get access to the data they need. While they can often get something that does the barebones of the tasks, and can do it well, where they fall down is that they're vulnerable to security issues and can't navigate their internal company politics to get permission to host things in the cloud and make their life easy, plus they don't have the experience to know what's good practice. I don't see AI changing things that much in that.
• malakai521 10mo ago
  You can already self-host a lot of open source software today, but people still buy subscriptions for SaaS-es
• jillesvangurp 10mo ago
  I'm seeing the opposite. AI is actually increasing the demand for what would previously be too expensive, bespoke integrations and solutions. Those are now becoming more feasible and doable. There is also the notion that a lot of companies are actually very behind on embracing software or SAAS. Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades. The fallacy here is believing we already had all the software we were going to use and that AI is now eliminating 90% of the work of creating that. The reality is inverted, we only had a fraction of the software that is now becoming possible and we'll be busy using our new AI tools to create absolutely massive amounts of it over the next years. The ambition level got raised quite a bit recently and that is starting to generate work that can only be done with the support of AI (or an absolutely massive old school development budget). It's going to require different skills and probably involve a lot more domain experts picking up easy to use AI tools to do things themselves that they previously would have needed specialized programmers for. You get to skip that partially. But you still need to know what you are doing before you can ask for sensible things to get done. Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere. Our typical customers would need help with all of that. The amount of times I've had to deal with a customer that had vibe coded anything by themselves remains zero. Just not a thing in the industry. Most of them are still juggling spreadsheets and ERP systems.
  • pjc50 10mo ago
    > Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades. > Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere. This is what I'm wondering about; things don't change because the company doesn't like change, and the risks of change are very real. So changes either have to be super incremental, or offer such a compelling advantage that they can't be ignored. And AI just doesn't offer the sort of reproducible, reliable results that manufacturing absolutely depends on.
    • jillesvangurp 10mo ago
• windex 10mo ago
  I dont think any opinion right now is going to be definitive. This is like mixing paint, the edges are still white, while the centre is colored. What Iam seeing is that customers are delaying purchases of large expensive software. Prime example; SAP. ECC migrations to SaaS model RISE/GROW-PublicCloud are stalling, same with onprem S4 to RISE. I see a whole bunch of my customers instead go with retaining the core but modernize surround apps with intelligent custom apps without feature bloat. For now, SAP/oracle/whatever remains the system of record, the edges are going away. I guess the same is likely happening in other spaces. This change is coming. Definitely. The current moats around SaaS will fall and the alternate ecosystem might not have moats at all.
• zkmon 10mo ago
  When you say agents, do you mean the workflow runners that can call APIs and automate the workflow steps? Automation is not new. What's new is the capabilities of the models that can be assigned with some of the workflow steps. If these steps were served by SaaS companies so far, they will still serve it. Maybe they make it much cheaper and use a model themselves.
• sublimefire 10mo ago
  The problem is that we are still talking only about software. If that is the only thing agents can do then they are just better IDE’s for programmers. This would be an enabler for building stuff faster. Think about it, there is already a huge market for SAAS, but most of the companies have contracts in place, so what we’ll have is just more competition which will drive prices down. Companies will not start changing internal tools, refactoring is a bad investment in general, if you choose that over some new features or products it signals larger issues, so nobody will replace existing cheap stuff that is working. Going back to the beginning, I think we just lack good tools for other cases where agents could be used. Copilot is not great, chatgpt alone lacks some features to use it for business as is. I think what will happen is that we will see a lot more new tooling pop up that relies on agents in niche markets which will just amplify the power users. It will be another category of SAAS the companies will adopt.
• Elizer0x0309 10mo ago
  Building any product requires endless highqu
• aszen 10mo ago
  Some of the risk outlined here are real for SaaS businesses that rely on user licenses. Automation, APIs and AI are going to reduce the no of people needed which means businesses buying less licenses overall. That's why smarter SaaS solutions are moving towards pay per usage. This is inevitable, you can't rely on user licenses as a growth metric
• raw_anon_1111 10mo ago
  I have been the tech lead for two companies between 2015-2020. The first company was a low margin business that sent home health care nurses to special needs kids and reimbursements came from Medicaid. I was hired by the new director to modernize their aging in house Electronic Medical System built on FoxPro 1999 running on SQL Server 2000 - in 2016. They had two “developers” who had been their for 10 and 20 years respectively who only knew Sql Server and FoxPro. They also had some other software. After doing some assessments of the situation, my report to the director and the CTO was that this company should not try to support a software development department and hire new people. Their margins are too small to be competitive or to keep people. I suggested we outsource everything to other consulting companies - not staff augmentation. Let the consulting company do the entire implementation based on a Statement of Work. The two “developers” role changed to “data analyst”. Even with AI I would have said the same thing today. Not every company needs to try to do software engineering. Every company does need to understand its data. [1] The next company was a startup. I was adamant about blocking every developer who suggested any internal tool that we could get a well known SaaS to do or where AWS had a service that wasn’t firefly related to our product. To use the cliche - anything “that didn’t make the beer taste better”. My opinion wouldn’t have changed with AI. The last thing I want is a bunch of bespoke internal vibe coded AI Slop that we have to support that is not in service to the product when we can find a reputable third party product. And no that doesn’t mean I am going to trust some unknown one person SaaS company. [1] 18 months into the job, I walked into the director’s office and told him, “let’s be honest, you all don’t need me anymore”. I purposefully put myself out of job. But boy did I have a story to tell during behavioral interviews at my next job at the startup and my interview for my job at BigTech after I left the startup.
• throwaway613745 10mo ago
  Not for my company. In my research AI is just completely incapable of doing what we do in a cost effective way and our customers don’t have the technical know-how to vibe an alternative. Our customers ask for about AI features and it’s a constant struggle to explain to them that they just aren’t there yet.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• oldandboring 10mo ago
  I'm reading this thread's comments and a LOT of you are missing OP's point. OP is not describing the risk that your SaaS product is now easily cloned by your customers' internal devs (or startup competitors) armed with agents. The risk is that certain SaaS products (but not all) mostly exist to provide answers to end users' questions about data, answers that can now be obtained by providing the same raw data to an agent with a prompt.
• gizmo 10mo ago
  If businesses are rational agents that seek to maximize profit then yes you would expect agentic AI to eat SaaS. But this is not the world we live in. So much of business could be automated with 1990s technology. A model that predicts societal change should also be able to explain why this time it's different. Historical precedent says we should expect: - modest incremental gains in productivity - society will remain mostly the same - very few people will take advantage of the opportunities unlocked by AI
• CyanLite2 10mo ago
  It was common in the early 2000s for big companies to have large internal IT teams to build "line of business" apps. Then SaaS came along and delivered LoB apps for a fraction of the price and with a monthly subscription. Looks like we're headed back to the internal IT days of building customized LoB apps.
  • dboreham 10mo ago
    Or perhaps there will arise a new kind of external service provider that delivers customized SaaS services to those same users, using AI. There's no reason the work has to go back to the internal IT people who were fired long ago.
• dangus 10mo ago
  I’m glad the author of the article mentions a lot of the limitations of this idea, but taking the final sentence: > But my key takeaway would be that if your product is just a SQL wrapper on a billing system, you now have thousands of competitors: engineers at your customers with a spare Friday afternoon with an agent. I think it’s pertinent to point out that a lot of SaaS products are aimed at businesses and individuals who don’t have engineers at all. AI agents aren’t going to disrupt the SaaS market for software intended for businesses like small business retail where the owners and staff have minimal technical knowledge and zero extra time. I also think that some SaaS products are so cheap that about an hour of effort is too much. Is it worth a month of effort to vibecode a Dropbox alternative? Even some pretty complicated software that is untouchable by agents and engineers’ side projects like the Microsoft 365 suite and Jira are priced at under $20/month/user. On the other hand, some entrenched solutions that aren’t all that complicated could be finding themselves with new, smaller competitors.
• mkagenius 10mo ago
  > If anything, I think we'll see (another) splintering in the market. Companies with strong internal technical ability vs those that don't. A tangent, I feel, again, unfortunately, the AI is going to divide society into people who can use the most powerful tools of AI vs those who will be only be using chatGPT at most (if at all). I don't know why I keep worrying about these things. Is it pointless?
  • tovej 10mo ago
    I do feel this divide, but from what I've read, and ehat I've observed, it's more a divide between people who understand the limited use-cases where machine learning is useful, and people who believe it should be used wherever possible. For software engineering, it is useless unless you're writing snippets that already exist in the LLMs corpus.
    • rglover 10mo ago
      > For software engineering, it is useless unless you're writing snippets that already exist in the LLMs corpus. If I give something like Sonnet the docs for my JS framework, it can write code "in it" just fine. It makes the occasional mistake, but if I provide proper context and planning up front, it can knock out some fairly impressive stuff (e.g., helping me to wire up a shipping/logistics dashboard for a new ecom business). That said, this requires me policing the chat (preferred) vs. letting an agent loose. I think the latter is just opening your wallet to model providers but shrug.
      • tovej 10mo ago
        If you need a shipping dashboard, then yeah, that's a very common, very simple use-case. Just hook up an API to a UI. Even then I don't think you'll make a very maintainable app that way, especially if you have multiple views (because the LLMs are not consistent in how they use features, they're always generating from scratch and matching whatever's closest). What I'm saying is that whenever you need to actually do some software design, i.e. tackle a novel problem, they are useless.
• Mistletoe 10mo ago
  This thread reeks of horse breeders saying cars won’t replace them.
• mritchie712 10mo ago
  The only SaaS that AI has eaten for us is Retool. It wasn't the cost (we were paying < $200 per month). Retool has become more clunky to use vs. writing code with AI to solve the problems we used Retool for.
  • shesprtytechncl 10mo ago
    Curious if you can share more about the types of things you were using retool for that you've migrated off?
• runako 10mo ago
  > I'm starting to see is people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies This practice predates even SaaS. I read this article expecting to see a specific SaaS that was at risk, and the most I saw was "dashboards." (Which: dashboards frequently aggregate data, while the ongoing work of collection/maintenance/etc. is done by more complex applications.) The thesis seems to be that companies can use coding agents to build one-off internal versions of SaaS apps like e.g. Workday or Salesforce or Slack or Jira or MixPanel or HubSpot. Which, if one could make such a thing for free and maintain it for free, why not? Fortunately/unfortunately depending on where you sit, magical thinking isn't going to get Claude Code to build Workday, regardless of the quality of your AGENTS.md. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these takes have spent any real time using Claude Code. It's good, but please be realistic.
  • martinald 10mo ago
    Author here. What I'm seeing in particular is CRM/ERP solutions at risk. I know of two people in my peer group who are actively trying to replace a 'niche' ERP/CRM (not salesforce) with a agent built alternative. These are both >$100k/yr contracts. They've outgrown the current (industry specific) products, arguably a long time ago. The discussions started like this: 1) Started building custom dashboards on top of data exports of said product with various AI tooling. 2) This was extremely successful, as a non developer "business" person could specify, build and iterate on the exact analytics. Painful to work with a developer on this as you need to quickly iterate once you see the data and realise where your thinking was wrong. Non developers also really struggle to explain this in a way that makes sense from a developers PoV. 3) ERP system at play wanted a renewal price which was a big increase, and API deprecation. This would require a lot of existing (pre "AI") integrations to be rewrote/redone. 4) Now building an internal replacement. They would not have even considered this before AI Agents. FWIW this tool is not super complex, but it is extremely expensive (for what it does). It already has a load of limitations which are being worked round with various levels of horrible hacks. There are a _lot_ of these kind of SaaS products about, for each industry. You never really hear about them. Btw I use claude code nearly every day for many hours. Opus 4.5 has been a huge leap forward, I am blown away with how it can do 10-30 minute sessions without going wrong (Sonnet definitely needed constant babysitting). And the models/agent harnesses are only getting better. Claude Code isn't even a year old yet!
• dboreham 10mo ago
  Present day AI is a box that has these properties: a human has to create its inputs; a human has to verify its outputs; a human has to create the next input based on the last output. Extremely useful for sure, but this is not the kind of box you can use to scale a service delivered directly to end users who can't perform the activities labeled "human" in the sentence above.
• vlugovsky 10mo ago
  I'm building a vibe-coding platform that helps with building internal apps and dashboards, and this is exactly what I have seen with some of our clients. A couple of them mentioned that they plan to cancel subscriptions totaling more than $100k/year for the apps they will replace with that SaaS. According to them, they have many subscriptions they keep only because of one feature. Another issue is that their workflows become a real mess when they need to copy and paste data into multiple tabs. Custom-built internal tools seem like an obvious solution. Those who migrate to custom-built tools, however, will face the challenge of orchestrating their lifecycle and creating a consistent deployment workflow, but this is one of the challenges we are trying to solve at UI Bakery. In my understanding, SaaS products that provide customers access to proprietary data are in a much better position than other SaaS platforms. HubSpot’s acquisition of Clearbit a couple of years ago now makes even more sense because it will help them retain some of their clients.
• biql 10mo ago
  There are already plenty of SaaS that offer open source version as a way to push to the cloud and charge for hosting, maintenance, support and some extra features. In that way, a working code have already been commoditized and those companies didn't disappear.
  • osn9363739 10mo ago
    I was looking for this comment (I was going to say the same) - I'm mostly on the backend services and infra side, and I have the option to host a lot of open-source tooling as opposed to paying for a service. I have to weigh up my options when deciding what to do, but a lot comes down to how much time I have and how much I'm willing to waste in time & hosting costs to keep the thing running. Also, do I need support, and ensure uptime and SLAs etc. Or what if I'm on holidays. I'm sure there are other things I'm not thinking of right now.
• anshulbhide 10mo ago
  >SaaS valuations are built on two key assumptions: fast customer growth and high NRR (often exceeding 100%). They are also on the basis of high gross margins of 80-90%. What happens to margins when you start including token variable costs?
• kkarpkkarp 10mo ago
  honestly, if you are bootstrapping anything, you don't need saas now for the start SaaS are swiss-army knife tools and you don't need all of this. do you want to have a contact form on your site? Don't but the whole WP plugin for forms, ask AI for tiny, well-aligned plugin which will display form fields and process the input. Do you need to A/B test your landing page? Just ask for another plugin which will switch page versions and track impressions. No need for Hubspot when you have google sheets + AI-made plugin for this.
• insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  > most SaaS products contain many features that many customers don't need or use. A lot of the complexity in SaaS product engineering is managing that - which evaporates overnight when you have only one customer (your organisation). This is the key point. Sure, you don't have the chops to be able to replicate the SaaS product locally with Claude/Gemini, but you don't have to, because you're no trying to make a product that can handle N+1 workflows.
• nkotov 10mo ago
  I worked at a couple of companies that tried to do internal LOB apps. Every single time, these projects have failed because the cost to maintain usually is more than just paying a subscription fee to a third party.
• irishmanlondon 10mo ago
  [dead]
• hennell 10mo ago
  This is what I don't get with a lot of the AI based saas projects - what is your value add? If you can build it with AI then (in theory) your customer can also build it with ai, so why do they need you? In the SaaS world you don't because the cost of development and maintenance just doesn't scale well, but if you're 99% a wrapper around an AI, your 'business' feels easily replicable to me. But that does leave a weird gap where SaaSes that took a lot of time to make but can now be handled by an Ai won't survive either. If the business stays hand-coded it costs too much to be viable, if it moves to Ai it looses any advantage over doing it youself.
• fumblebee 10mo ago
  My understanding is that agents are: 1) helping to saturate traditional SaaS because code is being commoditized / the effort to build is dropping significantly. 2) defining an adjacent sub-category of SaaS: "Service-as-a-Software" where the SaaS provides _outcomes_ instead of _tools_; this couldn't really exist at scale before recently.
• sebastianconcpt 10mo ago
  Isn't plenty of space of efficiency value in SaaS over AIs? And depending on the use-case and what the optimization is, also performance?
• yawnxyz 10mo ago
  for back office software, I'm actually getting more interest in building weird back office stuff than before, because people know what's possible now. I'm not a consultant anymore but my friend who owns a dental clinic asked me if I could build them a personalized system that checks in with the staff every week; a thing that helps analyze how they feel week to week and helps my friend update her management strategy and coaches her on how to talk with her staff / helps her figure out her staff's communication strategies and what work they prefer to do; and she'd like me to run and host it so she can't see the raw data from her staff so they'll trust it more as it's run by a third party. She could probably figure out how to do this but she'd still rather pay me like $5k to do this than spend 100+ hours figuring this out herself. Even with AI it'd probably take me at least a couple of weeks to get it working 100% as intended, and I don't have a dentist business to run. I think we'll see more back office SaaS, becuase the problems to solve are near infinite, and no one has time to build all these themselves.
• syngrog66 10mo ago
  I stopped reading after too many references to tasks solvable by a 1-line invocation of a CLI tool like ffmpeg or pandoc.
• Ncarpentieri4 10mo ago
  "I think we can start to see a world already where demand from new customers for certain segments of tooling and apps begins to decline. That's a problem, and will cause an increase in the sales and marketing expenditure of these companies." I think this sort of ignores the fact that S&M agentic tools exist and the cost of those services is also dramatically decreasing, so does it net out and just become a more efficient model in general?
• joshstrange 10mo ago
  In my experience, AI/Vibe-coded tools crumble under their own weight given enough iterations and even faster if there is no (real) developer in the loop overseeing/planning/reviewing. I think that _developers_ might be reaching for more LLM-built tools instead of SaaS in some cases and I also can believe that plenty of people _think_ they are vibe-coding up alternatives to SaaSes they pay for but I think those people are going to have a bad time when it eventually collapses (the tool they made, not talking about the AI bubble). I'm not anti-LLM (not in the slightest) and you can sometimes (it's not a given) get to 80-90% of an existing product/service with vibe-coding or LLM-assisted development but that last 10-20% (and especially that last 1-5%) are where it gets hard. Really hard. It's the typical "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially"-mentality IMHO. I feel this myself all the time, even before LLMs, "Oh, I could clone this easily!" and in many cases I could or even did... or at least I cloned the easy/basic/happy-path version that eschewed a whole slew of features I didn't need/care for. But then the complexity started to set in. [0] I have the same feeling for things I'm not even trying to clone, just build from scratch. I put together a cookbook for friends and family recently and used LLMs to help write essentially a static site generator to read my JSON data I created (some with the help of LLMs) and render it out as HTML (which I then turned into a PDF). My mind started to run with "Hmm, could I create a product out of this? It was relatively easy to get started..." but then reality set in and I remembered all the little tweaks I had to do (shorten a title here, reduce padding there, etc to make everything fit and look good). Sure, I got 80% of the way there in the first or second iteration of it using LLMs but there was plenty of massaging that had to happen to turn it into something usable that I could send to a printer.
• jrm4 10mo ago
  Any SaaS consumable by AI probably deserves it, no?
• alexeestec 10mo ago
  SaaS was always just a transitional phase between desktop software and... this. We built entire businesses around being the interface layer, but if AI can interact with APIs directly, that whole layer gets compressed. The optimistic angle nobody's exploring: maybe 'eating SaaS' means we finally escape the subscription hellscape where every basic function costs $29/month. If an AI agent can stitch together free/cheap APIs instead of forcing you into Notion/Airtable/Whatever, that's not destruction—that's evolution.
• MagicMoonlight 10mo ago
  You can already hire Indians to make your own HR system. People still choose SAAS, because the system already works. You do not want to have to plan out a system with 800 unique requirements yourself. It takes a ridiculous amount of work, and you are then stuck maintaining it. It’s never been about the difficulty of programming, it’s been about the pain of designing and maintaining.
• killerstorm 10mo ago
  Hmm, suppose Claude Code can make a prototype. But who's going to deploy it, make backups, integrate authentication, review security?.. Now, perhaps, it would be nice to have some kind of a ERP framework which would host AI-generated apps and connect them to each other. Is there anything like that?
• pojzon 10mo ago
  Yes when I need to convert music in one way or another I dont pay 0.1$ to do it and be over with it. I run Cloude Code to build that SaaS for me locally over the span of few weeks, to get the same value. This article makes no sense.
• efitz 10mo ago
  I’ve been saying this for months: https://efitz-thoughts.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-effect-of-llms-on-software-licensing.html https://efitz-thoughts.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-effect-of-ll...
• jaredcwhite 10mo ago
  Checked out as soon as I saw the word "moat". Classic tell this is tech bro-ese.
• poonia 10mo ago
  Waiting for each organization to write clone of jira for there own usage.
• karmasimida 10mo ago
  Saas is going to chipping away. Agents offer a very attractive level of abstraction, and its customers, aren't necessarily human: it could be other agents. Many saas we have today would simply be unnecessary in the future. If 90% of the actual work is waiting for Agent to get the work done, why would those companies keep paying those saas companies license fee per seat? It doesn't make sense.
• lowsong 10mo ago
  This article seems to suggest that businesses are going to swap domain-specific SaaS tools, written and tested by people knowledgable in the domain with specific SLAs for vibe coding everything. But your AI subscription is still a SaaS? All you've done is swapped a SaaS built for your problem domain with another, more expensive SaaS that has no support at all for your actual problem. Why would anyone want that? People buy SaaS products because they don't want to solve the problem, they just want it fixed. AI changes nothing about that.
• kyyt 10mo ago
  Vibe Coding is so easy nowadays, I coded an app almost by mistake. I put a short cryptic prompt into Kim2 to see how it would respond and it immediately (and very much to my surprise), coded an entire website with the functionality I was thinking about. It wasn't even a coherent grammatically correct sentence that I entered and it busily went to work building the site I had in mind. It's not hard to imagine that in the next 2-3 years, anyone will be able to build personalized apps on request.
• liampulles 10mo ago
  Teams I've worked in choose SaaS offerings based on how little expertise we have in the given domain, and the price (which includes actual monies going to the SaaS, but also the expected time of integrating with them and an expectation cost of migrating away from them). Experienced developers have the humility to understand that there are always roadbumps and risks in building a system in a domain we do not understand, and therefore paying another company with expertise can often be worth it. Obviously some SaaS companies are better than others, which is why there is an evaluation process. It does not surprise me (unfortunately) that proponents of using AI agents for everything minimize the value of actual lived experience in working in a given domain.
• Olivia8 10mo ago
  This resonates strongly, especially the shift in the build vs buy calculus happening almost invisibly. What feels under-discussed is that agents are not just reducing the cost of building software — they are collapsing the coordination and abstraction costs that SaaS historically justified. One emerging pattern I’m seeing is teams moving toward agent-orchestrated internal tooling rather than traditional “one-off” internal apps. Instead of rebuilding entire SaaS products, they compose narrow, task-specific agents that sit directly on top of their own data and workflows. This avoids both feature bloat and long-term roadmap dependency while keeping maintenance tractable. Platforms like Coldi AI, for instance, point toward this middle ground: not “replace all SaaS,” but replace the parts that are really just opinionated CRUD, dashboards, or glue code with agents that can evolve alongside the organization. That feels like the real threat surface for SaaS — not total displacement, but systematic erosion of NRR as customers internalize more of the value chain.