26 ms·

AI is killing B2B SaaS

• d_watt 9mo ago
  I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B tests etc... A given company or enterprise does not have to vibe code all this, they just need to make the 10 features with the SLA they actually care about, directly driven off the systems they care about integrating with. And that new, tight, piece of software ends up being much more fit for purpose with full control of new features given to company deploying it. While this was always the case (buy vs build), AI changes the CapEx/OpEX for the build case.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Exactly, a lot more focus -- and most importantly specific domain knowledge -- allows the end-user to build exactly what they need, fast.
  • bdcravens 9mo ago
    And in many cases, it's 12 features, with 2 of the features not even existing in the big SaaS. I'm pretty sure every developer who has dealt with janky workflows in products like Jira has planned out their own version that fits like a glove, "if only I had more time".
    • TheGRS 9mo ago
      JIRA especially, and I'm always shaking my fist at Atlassian that simple APIs or workflows or reports aren't already included in the tool. I have to pay some other company $10/user/month to get this dumb report your tool should already be able to do?? Insane.
    • falloutx 9mo ago
      If companies wanted to build thier own simple-JIRA they could have built themselves before. I dont think making a kanban board was hard even before AI.
      • beeper-beeps 9mo ago
        You’re describing Excel. AI will be used to do “excel better” more than “replace a managed, compliant, feature-rich-carefully-engineered, service”.
    • ryaniscool 9mo ago
      Jira has had free competitors that do at least 75% of what it does since it's inception. You could find a dozen on github that actually look good right now. In spite of this, Jira is bigger than ever.
  • gritspants 9mo ago
    Pretty much. My employer was looking to cut costs and they were spending ~500k a year on a product that does little more than map entra roles/groups to datasets and integrated with a federated query engine through a plugin. Took a couple days to build a replacement. The product had only a few features we needed.
    • elevation 9mo ago
      As niche SaaS provider, I'm trying to avoid succumbing to the same fate. The product I built carefully for years would now be within the reach of a senior dev with a couple focused weeks -- if they knew all the requirements. To avoid being overtaken, I'm working to increase my customer's requirements -- getting them hooked on new reports and features I never had time to build before LLMs could do it for me. This makes it less likely for a competitor to be able to afford to quickly replace me. At the same time, I have no idea what the cost of LLMs usage will be in the future. So I'm working to ensure the architecture stays clean and maintainable for humans in case this kind of tooling becomes untenable.
      • gritspants 9mo ago
        That sounds like a good strategy to me. We have a couple other products we're looking to knock out to reduce costs, and the decision comes down to me and another colleague. The thing these businesses have in common - difficult to partner with, rough edges for the use cases we need, and no appetite on their end to shore them up. We're paying premium prices for a subpar experience. If instead they adopted your thinking, perhaps we would've looked for savings elsewhere.
    • throwway120385 9mo ago
      I've found in the embedded space that people sell lots and lots of products that do everything you could ever want, and the most efficient thing to do is not buy those things and instead find a way to do just the subset of things you care about with your own back-end systems. The upshot of that is that because you're in total control if something goes wrong you can fix it without getting 6 people on a phone call to point fingers at each other.
  • physicsguy 9mo ago
    Until a given company decides they need access control for their contractors that's different from their employees, etc. etc. etc. - seen it all before with internal often data scientist written applications that they then try to scale out and run into the security nightmare and lack of support internally for developing and taking forward. Usually these things fizzle out when someone leaves and it stops working.
    • bandrami 9mo ago
      Bingo; the exact same arguments against regular-coding it in-house apply to vibe-coding it in-house.
  • chasd00 9mo ago
    there's no shortage of software engineers, if it was so easy for an organization to replace a saas with something built in-house they'd be doing it all the time. In my experience in enterprise consulting implementing a well defined requirement is the easiest part. Getting everyone to agree on the requirement, getting it defined, and stopping it from changing after every demo is the hard part.
  • ryaniscool 9mo ago
    Sure, and Github is filled with these 10 feature competitors. Some even have active communities. Didn't seem to kill off the big SaaS players or even weaken them.
• pjmlp 9mo ago
  Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Nice, what kind of agents and integrations are you seeing being used?
    • pjmlp 9mo ago
      Platforms like Boomi, Workato, Optimizely Opal,
• dotdi 9mo ago
  This immediately lost credibility for me with this quote: > And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach. Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Good point -- removed for being biased and partial. Thanks for the feedback!
    • warkdarrior 9mo ago
      "biased" and "impartial" are antonyms. Pick one or the other.
      • namanyayg 9mo ago
        Edited, allow me blame it on my ~12 hour workday today :^)
    • lelanthran 9mo ago
      > Good point -- removed for being biased and impartial. Thanks for the feedback! ??? Do you mean biased or do you mean impartial?
  • zbiku 9mo ago
    And if I understand correctly the author is running a business that helps SaaS companies overcome the risk of using their own vibe-coded solutions.
• JaggedJax 9mo ago
  Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies with questionable long-term businesses who are getting hit, but that was bound to happen.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    System of Records especially for boring industries is the way to go. What kind of wrapper SaaS are you seeing getting dropped?
    • JaggedJax 9mo ago
      Analytical systems. I see a lot of add-on services that will add intelligence/analytics/etc and companies try them out to solve some issue they have and bounce off them frequently due to growing costs. I can only assume as mentioned that over time these are also easier for companies to in-house vibe-code as well, I just haven't seen a ton of that yet, but people are definitely trying which still shrinks the available pie.
  • jordanb 9mo ago
    The stocks of a lot of these SaaS companies were priced on the expectation that they could become the next IBM: become entrenched with the customer and then hike prices until their eyes bleed. A lot of companies have been too smart for that, and a lot of SaaS offerings are too small to be truly entrenched. Arguably the investment horizon is too short (IBM took decades getting to that point). The only real vendors who managed to become the next IBM are the cloud providers.
  • linkjuice4all 9mo ago
    I think it's a combination of budgeting, upward price pressure from the SaaS companies themselves, plus bringing things in-house through vibe coding, but there's another factor that I think is harming existing SaaS products. Many of them are becoming legacy solutions with AI bolted on top so they don't really feel that effective or next-level. The underlying tech might even be a generation older too - but the SaaS value-add is providing support, scaling, etc to maintain whatever some old tech that's still a requirement. At some point someone looks at all of these interconnected systems and just says 'start over'. Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
• guywithahat 9mo ago
  I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Yup it's definitely not because _customers_ are coding solutions, but the trend and motivation seems to come from the fact that customers are realizing there's something else possible except being tied into expensive recurring yearly subscriptions. I was surprised when I saw the numbers from Bloomberg myself as well!
• fogzen 9mo ago
  Having worked in enterprise B2B SaaS for a long time, almost every feature I built could have been a simple spreadsheet or some emails. So I'm highly skeptical AI is going to change anything. Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.
• re-thc 9mo ago
  Are B2B sales actually impacted or is the stock market just randomly predicting AI will impact B2B and selling off? Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?
• chaitanyya 9mo ago
  Well it definitely killed mine so I can't say this is not true
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Oh no...
  • lelanthran 9mo ago
    > Well it definitely killed mine so I can't say this is not true I feel like there's an interesting story in there.
  • tiffanyh 9mo ago
    I'm sorry to hear that ... if not too painful, would you mind sharing more (so others can learn).
• epolanski 9mo ago
  > How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every customer feels they can get something better built with vibe-coded AI products? Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus. Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades. This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management. For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment. I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.
  • zdragnar 9mo ago
    Having participated in the build of an inventory system / system of record for a large national retail company, I can't see vibe coding helping anything more than the prototyping in the discovery / requirements gathering parts of the process. The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road. Lots of drudge work can be assisted by AI, especially if you need to do things like in ingest excel sheets or spit out reports, but I would run far away from anything vibe coded as hard as possible.
    • bbatha 9mo ago
      Its funny you mention excel, I see vibe coding in the business sense right now being a gateway to replace all of the ad hoc uses of excel. We've basically leveled up the quality of the software you can build before buying a SaaS product or a hiring an in house engineer.
• morgango 9mo ago
  Be a System of Record, not just a Wrapper™ is excellent advice.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Thank you! I hope you enjoyed the little ™ at the end as well.
• vemv 9mo ago
  It's not and I really doubt it will, for true SaaS platforms. A desktop .gif recorder (frequent example I've read about) is not a SaaS, even if you charge monthly for it. Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead. One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.
  • insane_dreamer 9mo ago
    There are many cases where the company might only use a fraction of the features (and therefore complexity) of the SaaS and so only need to develop and maintain those features they actually need. That's when ditching the SaaS can make sense if you can easily develop/maintain what you specifically need on your own with AI assistance.
    • falloutx 9mo ago
      Even if they use it less, if you combine all of the Saas products used by a company, thats a tiny fraction of the overall CapEx. And this cost is tax deductible, so there is no reason to optimise it unless Execs are really penny pinching, but at that point that company isn't worth selling to anyway.
• jboggan 9mo ago
  I don't think it is killing SaaS. I have definitely had to extend my sales cycle when a potential customer vibe-coded a quick fix for a pain point that might have triggered a sale a few weeks earlier, but eventually the benefit delivered by someone else caring about the software as their entire mission really wins out over a feature here and there. If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally. Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    Yeah I have been saying this since the start of vibe coding, Saas companies rely on their sales, who are good enough to sell ther products even in tougher conditions. Software costs for the companies is 100% tax deductible, and they spend a very little on it (Most of times its less than 1% of CapEx). Only reason to optimize this cost is if the Execs of those companies think you can sell the same product.
    • mooreds 9mo ago
      > Software costs for the companies is 100% tax deductible Section 174 almost changed that, but was reversed last year. https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/alerts-lifesciences-one-big-beautiful-bill-act-tax-implications https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/07/...
  • pphysch 9mo ago
    > Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration. Failed/partial/expensive migrations is the name of the game with SaaS as well. Lock-in is the bottom line. Migrations become much less scary when you truly own your data and can express it in any format you like. SaaS will keep sticking around, especially those that act like white-hat ransomware.
• semiquaver 9mo ago
  I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    I'm the biggest typography nerd and I'll fight to death in the defense of ligatures! Bring them back
    • semiquaver 9mo ago
      I love ligatures and typography too but not these.
• raunaqvaisoha 9mo ago
  Focus is a currency and you have a limited amount of it, if all SaaS is built internally, teams would go bankrupt. There's likely always going to be a band of experts focused on solving a problem and everyone pays them to solve it for them, because they do it better and can handle the hassle of maintaining it.
• avereveard 9mo ago
  here's the secret saas can vibe code features too on top of their paid well developed and secured api. they can get off their ass and vibe code a mcp wrapper, so user can use the ai tooling they pay for to interact with their saas. and they'd be called visionary hero of the agentic revolution. but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    Some founders are realizing this, we're helping a lot of B2B SaaS achieve exactly this with our whitelabelled solution.
    • avereveard 9mo ago
      well then, happy first billion, where I send a resume?
• pagwin 9mo ago
  Something notable for SaaS which this article doesn't mention is that in some cases the reason to buy rather than make yourself is due to needing to handle a bunch of different regulations which LLMs don't threaten (barring businesses which would rather have lawsuits than pay for a SaaS).
• harundu 9mo ago
  Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. But, not sure which successful SaaS companies just stopped shipping any updates to the product, never talked to their customers and never added any new features to win over major new accounts - and still managed to survive and thrive? And the author actually confirms this: > AI isn’t killing B2B SaaS. It’s killing B2B SaaS that refuses to evolve.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    > They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. And all of those updates are just AI features.
  • re-thc 9mo ago
    > Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. Can you though? With major bugs? We've been getting more and more crashes, downtime, issues etc lately and a lot of it has had to do with vibe coding. The whole point of these B2B SaaS is meant to be quality. i.e. it's set users' expectations but in the wrong way.
  • Hamuko 9mo ago
    >They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. How's that going for Microsoft? https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/2025-has-been-an-awful-year-for-windows-11-with-infuriating-bugs-and-constant-unwanted-features https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/2025-has...
• MagicMoonlight 9mo ago
  No it isn’t. Writing the code was never the issue with making software, it was designing it. You can shit out an app with AI, just like you could with Indian workers. But that doesn’t mean it will work properly or that you’ll be able to maintain it. And most importantly, it only works for code they could steal from GitHub. It has no idea how to replicate sensitive systems which aren’t publically documented, and those are some of the most valuable contracts.
• stego-tech 9mo ago
  I don't think AI is killing B2B SaaS so much as companies are finally reckoning with the immense costs of SaaS in a markably different environment than when SaaS exploded in popularity, and AI offers an off-ramp to some. Let's break it down camp-by-camp to show you what I mean: 1) The must-haves. These are your email and communication systems, the things you absolutely have to have up and available at all times to do business. While previously self-hosted (Exchange/Sendmail, IRC/Skype/Jabber, CallManager/UCS), the immense costs and complexities of managing systems ultimately built on archaic, monolithic, and otherwise difficult-to-scale technologies meant that SaaS made sense from a cost and a technical perspective. Let's face it, the fact nobody really hosts their own e-mail anymore in favor of Proton/Microsoft/Google/et al shows that self-hosting is the exception here, not the norm - and they're not going anywhere regardless of how bad the economy gets. These are the "housing stock" of business, and there's plenty of cheap stock always available to setup shop in without the need for technical talent. 2) The juggernauts. The, "we can do this ourselves, but the pain will be so immense that we really don't want to". This is the area where early SaaS solutions cornered and exploded in growth (O365, ServiceNow, Google Workspaces), because managing these things yourself - while feasible, even preferable - was just too cheap to pass up having someone else wrangle on your behalf with a reasonable SLA, freeing up your tech talent for all the other stuff. The problem is that once-focused products have become huge behemoths of complex features that most customers neither need nor use on a regular basis, at least after the initial pricey integration. Add in the ease of maintainability and scalability brought by containers or microservices, along with the availability and reliability of public cloud infrastructure, and suddenly there's more businesses re-evaluating their relationships with these products in the face of ever-rising prices. With AI tooling making data exfiltration and integration easier than ever from these sorts of products, I expect businesses to start consolidating into a single source of truth instead of using dozens of specific product suites - but not toppling any outright. 3) The nice-to-haves. The Figmas, the HubSpots, the myriad of niche-function-high-cost SaaS companies out there making up the bulk of the market. Those whose products lack self-hosted alternatives risk having vibe-coded alternatives be "good enough" for an Enterprise looking to slash costs without regard to long-term support or quality; those who compete with self-hosted alternatives are almost certainly cooked, to varying degrees. If AI tooling can crank out content similar in quality to Figma and the company has tech talent to refine it for long-term use, why bother paying for Figma? If AI tooling can crank out a CRUD UI for users that just executes standard REST API calls behind the scenes, then why bother paying for fancy frontends? While it's technically interesting and novel at how these startups solved issues around scaling, or databases, or tenancy, the reality is that a lot of these niche products or services could be handled in-house with a container manager, a Postgres instance, and a mid-level IT person to poke it when things go pear-shaped. The higher per-seat prices of a lot of these services make them ripe for replacement in businesses comfortable with leveraging AI for building solutions, and I expect that number to grow as the tools become more widely available and IT-friendly in terms of security. Ultimately, the core promise of SaaS to business customers was all the functionality with none of the costs of self-hosting support. Nowadays, many of them have evolved into solutions that are more expensive than self-hosted options, and businesses that have shifted IT into public clouds or container-based systems have realized they can do the same thing for less themselves, at the cost of some UI/UX niceties in the process. Now that we (IT) can crank out integrations with local LLMs with little to no cost, we're finally able to merge datasets into singular pools or services - and I'm not talking about Snowflake or its "big data" ilk so much as just finally getting everything into Salesforce or ServiceNow without having to bring in consultants. The must-haves and many of the juggernauts will remain - for now. It's the niche players that need to watch their moats.
• random3 9mo ago
  AI isn't killing B2B SaaS. It's killing the service economy. Perhaps, the correct term, technically, is just shrinking it to very very small fraction.
• sqircles 9mo ago
  I would assume one major thing here is that many orgs only need a small subset of functionality from what most products provide. Many times, that small subset of functionality is only "good enough" in and of itself, but the org is paying the premium for the entire suite of whatever it is. This makes realizing that an LLM can get them to MVP and beyond much easier. Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.
  • danielmarkbruce 9mo ago
    There is also the benefit of being able to use a single database (and hence schema) across multiple "apps". In many cases the complexity arises from the fact that all these apps have their own databases.
• zipy124 9mo ago
  no. High interest rates and a cautionary view of future economic growth are killing B2B SaaS. Money is no longer free, and so there is a bigger push for cost-cutting rather than growing your buisness with free money.
• cess11 9mo ago
  "The SaaS model was built on a simple premise: we build it once, you pay forever." I've never seen a SaaS product that fits this description. There are always things to do. Libraries to upgrade, performance bottlenecks to diddle around with, an endless stream of nonsense feature requests from people at the customer who never actually use the product, fun experiments your developers want to try out, and so on. The hard part in SaaS is to delete code, and that's what you should do, at least some of the time. Either through simplifications, or just outright erasing functionality that very few if any of your customers rely on. What you should not do is let your customers grow the liability that is code in your production environment, unless your entire product set is designed to handle things like this, e.g. the business models of Salesforce and SAP.
• esafak 9mo ago
  I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?
  • croes 9mo ago
    AI
    • esafak 9mo ago
      It's hard to tell when people are joking.
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    Imagine working at a company who has it own Figma, Docker etc... Thats a recipe for disaster.
    • esafak 9mo ago
      And you'd have to relearn everything every time you changed companies.
  • conductr 9mo ago
    > Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Yes, a lot. > Who's taking care of it? It's not hard. We wouldn't do it for tools that are purpose made and have sane pricing in the market place. We do it for stuff that would traditionally go on a 'platform' like Salesforce or something that requires a lot of customization to begin with. It's so much easier to just roll your own than even just going through the procurement process of those kinds of tools much less the integration and change process (hiring consultants, etc). I'm not hands on with it, but I know our small group of AI are helping us eliminate $5m recurring annual spend this year and that's directly impacting the topic article. I won't be surprised if at some point we replace our more sticky ERP software or use this leverage to negotiate prices that are sane. Businesses have been gouged by enterprise software long enough.
    • 9mo ago
• deleted 9mo ago
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• cmiles8 9mo ago
  “Killing” is a bit strong, but is there a world where folks just vibe code solutions that they would have bought previously? Absolutely and and I think that world is here now. I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher. (Insert rant from dev teams about the code sucks, who will maintain it, etc). Yes all valid points, but things are changing regardless of if folks like it or not.
  • throw1235435 9mo ago
    A lot of startups/small businesses are like "with AI we can build more than ever". The problem is so can everyone else and capitalism rewards scarcity not value. The bar for startups and small software business has risen quite substantially. I know we are avoiding buying software now where I work if possible unless we previously committed to it (contracts).
  • hunterpayne 9mo ago
    Counterpoint, all your customer's data just got stolen by teenagers in the 3rd world and is available for purchase on the dark web. Was it worth saving $5k a month?
• metalrain 9mo ago
  I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.
  • croes 9mo ago
    > it's quality, availability, price, etc. Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc. The F in SharePoint stands for fast
    • metalrain 9mo ago
      Yes, many don't like Sharepoint, but still they use it. It's the tool they can use. Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great! It's not about the product it's about the results.
    • ako 9mo ago
      You're proving the point? Sharepoint, teams: availability + price. Every company has microflows, sharepoint and teams are automatically available and part of the price or lower priced than the competition.
      • croes 9mo ago
        You missed quality and the price isn't that cheap
  • falloutx 9mo ago
    They didnt, dont make the mistake of thinking Saas companies are just software companies. They are Sales companies who happen to sell software. Companies like Dropbox & Atlassian have long been surpassed in Tech but they live only because they continue selling even when demand was hard to get. Their moat is sales & networking and software has to be just good enough. And other part is service, these companies still have one of best costumer service since the start of early 2010s. You can still get refund on Uber quite easily, but if you try doing that at a regular old school company you would require a prayer and couple of business weeks.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• manishsharan 9mo ago
  I used to be a big advocate for Salesforce in my organization. And it was really great .. allowing us to deliver new functionality without the usual IT procurement bureaucracy. Now with cloud maturity and Vibe coders who will get better and cheaper, I think it's possible to replace all the features we use on Salesforce at a fraction of the cost of our Salesforce licensing cost.
  • trgn 9mo ago
    counterpoint: why would sales people want to use a different crm each time they job hop every 2-3 years?
• spprashant 9mo ago
  Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.
  • Hamuko 9mo ago
    The bus factor is gonna be pretty high if your enterprise relies on an internal tool that some guy at your company vibe coded at some point.
    • rvnx 9mo ago
      This was true pre-AI, but now, the bus factor is actually way lower in any software than it was before: - Hey Claude, what is the project in XXXXX/ about and how does it work ? What should be improved there ?
      • opencodeinit 9mo ago
        Or even better: $opencode /init Wait 20 second, then describe the bug. AGENTS.md seems to exist not just to save tokens, but also so the Bus has to do overtime Isekaing people before a company goes down.
    • falloutx 9mo ago
      Bus factor would be 0 because even he wont be able to debug it.
• TheGRS 9mo ago
  I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.
• ezekg 9mo ago
  Anybody who says this doesn't understand build vs buy, and why companies buy in the first place, or they'll selling AI.
  • soulchild37 9mo ago
    Bingo, the OP is selling AI, and wrote multiple blog posts to promote his tool, this is just fear induced sales pitch.
• AstroBen 9mo ago
  Here is the list of evidence the author gives for why AI is the reason software company stocks are down:
  • trgn 9mo ago
    but it is down 25% in days. if not contagion that ai is going to kill saas, then what?
• exceptione 9mo ago
  If that would be true, expect in the next decade a frantic search for seclusive grey beards, those who haven't given up their rituals and ancient languages. If your workforce is vibing all day, they will have no capacity for maintenance, because it isn't their code. So the maintenance that happens will be slop and more spaghetti. I am not saying cases like that never existed before, but such companies will face a moment of truth sooner or later.
• eli 9mo ago
  I don't really agree with this. Simple CRUD app sure, but we're nowhere near being able to vibe code even a relatively low-complexity enterprise SaaS product. If it's got customer data in it and/or you're making important business decisions based on it, you really need your system to be accurate and secure. My experience is the people who procure enterprise software know this and tend to care a lot about it. They often have legal and contractual obligations around that. In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers.
  • mschuster91 9mo ago
    > In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers. And yet, precisely that happened in the end, just not with the tools envisioned. Excel, VBA and, where you had one knowledgeable employee, MS Access makes for incredibly powerful and incredibly hard to maintain "shadow IT" - and made even more difficult when someone sneaked in a password, because that takes a bit of an effort to remove [1], knowledge that is easy for us today to find, but not when I was young. Also, back in the IE6 era, there was a lot of point-and-click created web interfaces... just that it wasn't HTML5 or even HTML. It was an <object> tag loading some ActiveX written by some intern in VB6, or Java, or Flash. I sort of miss that era but also, it was a damn security nightmare. Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits, but at least it didn't run native code with full user privileges by design. I'm not kidding, theoretically you could go and import/use functions from any system DLL up to and including Kernel32. OLE/OCX, ActiveX... a design way ahead of its time. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/removing-the-password-from-a-vba-project https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/removing-the-pass...
    • 9mo ago
• kriro 9mo ago
  I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically the opposite of...let's have someone inhouse vibe code and push to production. B2B is usually fairly conservative.
  • kachapopopow 9mo ago
    hard disagree, several b2b categories are going extinct because AI just completely replaced them. I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
    • nozzlegear 9mo ago
      Perhaps the case for premium CSS SaaS businesses, I guess (which seems particularly primed for disruption even pre-AI), but there are many more robust B2B categories out there that aren't literal code + docs as a service.
    • mikeocool 9mo ago
      TailwindUI isn't really what I'd consider SaaS -- it was a buy once and download software product. That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs. If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
    • no_wizard 9mo ago
      TailwindUI unfortunately sits in a position of being an easy to disrupt business with current AI. Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
• nozzlegear 9mo ago
  > AI is killing B2B SaaS Anecdata sample size of one, but this is not my experience at all. My business has only continued to grow over the past couple years, and I don't think I've had a single customer mention AI to me at all (over the phone or email).
• scott-iii 9mo ago
  the procurement bypass was the best part. now watching ai devs ship faster than our salesforce admin could configure flows
• clarity_hacker 9mo ago
  [dead]
• hoppp 9mo ago
  The trick is to build stuff that is hard to vibe code
  • OutOfHere 9mo ago
    Yes, that is not the random SaaS product, possibly not any SaaS software at all.
    • hoppp 9mo ago
      Its not that hard. I am building a desktop app that deploys and manages high availability postgres instances on VPS right now.. The AI is constantly failing at helping me because its about generating and managing remote configuration that is very fragile if something is missing.
• throw876987696 9mo ago
  Time will tell.
• ahmedhawas123 9mo ago
  As a founder, there is another angle here that is worth mentioning. Not only does AI B2B SaaS allow insourcing, it also allows there to be 10x (imaginary number) the number of companies building SaaS for the same use case. What we see in healthcare or finance for example is executive fatigue from demos, in many cases mostly vibe coded frontend UIs that entrepreneurs are using to test the market. This creates friction for businesses / SaaS companies that are unable to show how their solution is unique, well built or has a clear moat over the many others they have seen.
  • brikym 9mo ago
    Bang on. I mentioned this as well. Mature SaaS companies are also expanding into each others domains. Notion is now doing email for example.
• kgwxd 9mo ago
  Maybe the type of SaaS that's akin to stock media (photos, video, music). Just hard enough to do from scratch, but not important enough that it needs to be exceptional in it's field. I've made some money off software like that, and it was nice, but I always knew it couldn't last. Better developers took most of it from me years ago.
• mattas 9mo ago
  For the most part, you can replicate any B2B SaaS product in a spreadsheet. The same reasons why spreadsheets didn't kill B2B SaaS apply to "in house vibe coded SaaS replacements." The original in house apps are (and continue to be) spreadsheets.
• 827a 9mo ago
  This isn't happening. The past six months has been rough on public B2B SaaS valuations, but the impact is a lot wider than just B2B SaaS (its all non-S&P10 software), and valuations are just vibes in the end. Most of these companies are, financially, doing pretty well; seeing key metric growth, including revenue and profit. This makes sense: AI does not fundamentally change the bargain SaaS brought to the table, that companies would rather pay someone to solve their problems than solve them themselves. However, the stock market doesn't care about this. The stock market doesn't care about anything; it behaves irrationally and non-sensically, and trying to derive any sense of how stable, strong, or successful a company is from stock market valuation is like using lines of code to claim that a software project is really good.
  • operatingthetan 9mo ago
    >that companies would rather pay someone to solve their problems than solve them themselves. Are they not able to just engage AI to solve those problems now? E.g. this morning I saw an app that did something interesting to me for $20 a month. 20 minutes in Gemini and I had a functional app that replicated the behavior. SaaS are more complex but give me a small team and a couple months and we could replicate most any of them.
    • 827a 9mo ago
      No one is replacing Jira or Salesforce with an internally-AI'd analogue.
      • operatingthetan 9mo ago
        Give it a year.
  • sdf2erf 9mo ago
    Equity markets both private and public are mangled today, for a wide range of reasons which I wont get into. Financial performance e.g. revenue is what counts right now as any hard-evidence.
• hansmayer 9mo ago
  "For example, to create a data visualization I won’t seek any SaaS. I’ll just code one myself using many of the popular vibe coding tools (my team actually did that and it’s vastly more flexible than what we’d get off-the-shelf)." That maybe doable in your 10-people startup, Namanyay. Try doing it in a larger organisation with layers upon layers of firewalls, databases, authentication systems and not the least importantly - management. Not to mention the vastly different audience, both in size and interest. Your own experience is not the experience of everyone else.
  • mritchie712 9mo ago
    also, who pays for "a data visualization" SaaS? I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc. Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direction and we're (https://www.definite.app/ https://www.definite.app/) trying to beat them to it.
    • ebbi 9mo ago
      Definite looks pretty interesting!
      • mritchie712 9mo ago
        thanks! It's been a long, painful 3 years getting here.
• jongjong 9mo ago
  Just because it's possible to build equivalent software by vibe coding doesn't necessarily mean that companies will stop using SaaS. There are multiple reasons why... First of all, many big companies pay a fortune to use inferior SaaS solutions instead superior Open Source solutions; possibly because one of their CTO may have received kickbacks or promises of a lucrative job at the SaaS provider as a consequence of this deal. There are a lot of politics going on behind the scenes when it comes to procurement. Execs at big corporations are often looking for plausible ways to spend investors' money in a way that they can capture some of it for themselves. If they choose open source or they choose cheap vibe coded solutions; there is not much money changing hands. No opportunities for insiders to covertly monetize. And then there are a lot of security implications to using a complex vibe coded app. The AI won't be able to identify the vulnerability in any decent sized codebase unless you know what you want it to look for.
• swiftcoder 9mo ago
  Until Claude Code comes with indemnity insurance for HIPAA / GDPR / etc… B2B SaaS is here to stay. You want me to convince my auditor that the vibe-coded in house software handles PII correctly? Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’
  • niyikiza 9mo ago
    Spot on. You could argue that most companies buying B2B SaaS could almost always build a clone internally but they need someone to assume SLA and liability.
• CuriouslyC 9mo ago
  AI isn't killing SaaS exactly, but instead of selling UIs, SaaS companies are going to have to focus on infrastructure and data. You have to host stuff somewhere, so there's an inescapable cost and transaction that has to take place. If businesses can pay one bill for infra + data management and get nice apps and stuff on top of that (without being locked in), that makes more sense than trying to roll stuff together even if you have a platform team.
• mbesto 9mo ago
  1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore." 2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools" 3. "Analysts are writing notes titled “No Reasons to Own” software stocks." - there is just one analyst saying this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stocks-140000103.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stock... 4. Most of these SaaS tech stocks have been trading at all time highs...this smells of "explain something very complex with a simple anecdote" EDIT: Oh lol, the author has a vibe coding SaaS offering...there ya go.
  • IhateAI 9mo ago
    Yeah, also if a SaaS costs, 10k a year, I promise its not not more cost effecient to pull your 10k a month engineer off their usual work to build and then maintain some vibe coded slope everytime an edge case occurs. Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
    • moregrist 9mo ago
      Even in companies that have SWE, do you really want to divert in-house SWE time to something as exciting as ... accounting rules and making sure your inventory is auditable? Or any number of the weird compliance things associated with most B2B software for a medium-size business?
    • sdf2erf 9mo ago
      Is there a place on the internet where folks like yourself, who seemingly have a way to think economically congregate? I personally dont know of one, for which if I did, I wouldnt visit here anymore. So many takes on here are so lazy and simpleton that when you go a few levels deeper all the flaws get exposed.
• gradus_ad 9mo ago
  One problem with centrally produced and distributed software is that a small subset of users demanding certain features results in feature bloat for everyone. Costs for all features are shared by all users. Probably one way SaaS companies will adapt is to break up their offerings into more modular low cost components. While many customers will end up paying less, the addressable market will probably increase because of the new low cost options.
  • physicsguy 9mo ago
    > Costs for all features are shared by all users. To a degree but most enterprise focused software usually has differential pricing. Often that pricing isn't public so different companies get different quotes.
• physicsguy 9mo ago
  I just don't buy it. Most people who've been in a business SaaS environment know that writing the software is relatively the easy part aside from in very difficult technical domains. The sales cycle + renewals and solution engineering for businesses is the majority of the work, and that's going nowhere.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• paxys 9mo ago
  While the author is wildly overstating things, I do think AI is striking at the heart of the SaaS problem, which is the business model of "pay us $10-100+ per employee per month in perpetuity or we will hold all your data and your company's operations hostage". There is always going to be value in good software, but it is shitty vendors relying on the lock-in effect that are in danger. And good riddance. The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.
  • pcurve 9mo ago
    Agree on the valuations. Most have come down and many have overcorrected imho. As expensive as some of these software seem in terms of cost per seat, most of the subscription contract rarely exceed a few hundred thousand / year if even $1mm, which is drop in a bucket for many companies. (vs running on-prem servers, having staff to support them) You'd think Atlassian would be printing money given everybody under the sun is using them, but they only make $5B in annual revenue. I've worked at fortune 50 companies for a while and custom enterprise software is still alive and well for things that are too business specific to buy off the product for. But they're not going to be in a rush to create their own Workday, Salesforce, Jira, Figma, SAP, etc.
• comfortabledoug 9mo ago
  if you're a software company and all your clients are in tech...you're gonna have a bad time. godspeed.
• lateforwork 9mo ago
  > build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. Unless you consider customer acquisition cost. Not considering cost of sales is one of the big mistakes software developer entrepreneurs make.
• bandrami 9mo ago
  It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it. I didn't understand it before I was in management either, but now that I'm in management I 100% get it.
  • scotty79 9mo ago
    Your profit margin is my opportunity.
  • misiti3780 9mo ago
    sorry, what do you mean?
    • vladms 9mo ago
      If I understand correctly many organizations will not develop original stuff internally, because nobody internally wants to be the one is shouted at if something goes wrong.
      • bandrami 9mo ago
        That's a huge part of it. But also you presumably hired a full-time programmer for a reason, and in almost every case that reason was not to have somebody to write and maintain your CRM system. So any system they build and maintain is not just another thing for you to worry about, it's a huge chunk of time that the developer isn't doing what you hired them for.
      • dyauspitr 9mo ago
        Depends on the size of the organization.
    • sbarre 9mo ago
      1. Enthusiastic employee (vibe-)codes a replacement for a turnkey SaaS product that the company uses. 2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app. 3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up. 4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project. 5. Pain
• medius 9mo ago
  A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, etc. Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI. I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet! Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"
  • cpursley 9mo ago
    Regarding your last comment, majority of the people here are costal with FAT paychecks slinging code for VCs. It’s a totally different universe than running a Saas. That said, still a valuable forum.
• kittikitti 9mo ago
  I disliked how SaaS CEO's were decrying the death of engineers. Their coordinated layoffs over the past years or so was excruciating to watch and experience. Their language was aggressive and inflammatory. Although the article may also be hyperbolic, I'm not going to comment on reasons why it might be. Instead, I will agree, and think SaaS companies stock performance this year will be proof. Sure, it might not be the collapse that AI doomers are hoping for, but all the FUD they spread over the past few months to years will signal that they're not insulated from it. They made their cake, now they have to eat it too.
• kuil009 9mo ago
  This feels a lot like the old RPA hype cycle to me — more sales narrative than structural change. Most companies are not going to replace stable SaaS with a pile of AI-generated internal tools. They don’t want the maintenance or the risk. If there’s a real B2B game changer, it’s Microsoft. The day Excel gets a serious, domain-aware AI that can actually model workflows, clean data, and automate logic properly, half of these “build vs buy” debates disappear. People will just solve problems where they already work. Excel has always been the real business platform. AI will just double down on that, not kill SaaS.
  • takklob 9mo ago
    [dead]
• brikym 9mo ago
  I can see three forms of competition here: - A company vibe codes their own app to replace a SaaS. Great when they only wanted a small chunk of the functionality. - Startups benefitting from AI coding are copying mature SaaS companies and competing on price. - Mature SaaS companies are branching out into each others domains. Notion is doing email. Canva is doing an office suite.
• byronic 9mo ago
  at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews
• vegabook 9mo ago
  With a new agentic-lashup tearing across the internet every week, pointing the way to "gradient descent" software development, any purchasing manager worth their salt is going to ask some serious questions about their enormous SaaS bill before committing to another expensive long term contract. It follows that valuations must decline. Even if only because risks to moats have increased, but also because it makes sense to negotiate hard on pricing when there's fear in your counterparty.
  • AtomicLynx 9mo ago
    Preposterous. Have you ever worked for a company as a programmer or for that matter as a manager? They don't just replace products ad hoc. There's an enormous amount of due diligence that goes into any new software product - making sure it fits the company, that it's secure, that it works properly... I recently worked at a small startup who spent on sales force @ $100,000 a year. I said you know what we could do this ourselves and you know what they said as every company I've ever said that to says? "We don't want to support it. We need to cover our ass. Everybody knows how to use this"
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
• gwbas1c 9mo ago
  Reminds me of the story of when the Surgeon General (in the US) reported that smoking causes cancer. People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later. I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just like how many less people smoke today than in the past, the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point someone will figure out how to replace SaS with AI; it's just going to take a lot longer than many think.
  • miklosz 9mo ago
    And where are they now (cigarette companies)?
    • missedthecue 9mo ago
      Altria has 72.2% gross margins. 45% net
    • caminante 9mo ago
      Well, that was 1964. Smoking survived. At least 2 have 100B market caps.
    • omosubi 9mo ago
      https://straitsresearch.com/report/e-cigarette-market https://straitsresearch.com/report/e-cigarette-market
  • pier25 9mo ago
    > it's just going to take a lot longer than many think I'd be very surprised if devs were fully replaced by AI in less than 10 years.
• drnick1 9mo ago
  Maybe things will finally go full circle and people/companies will restart self-hosting their infrastructure instead of farming out everything.
• hakanensari 9mo ago
  Maybe the new SaaS is to build vibe coding (aka conversation) into whatever you’re offering.
  • trgn 9mo ago
    thats what theyre all doing. its gimmick and wont really fix the underlying issue.
• DaedalusII 9mo ago
  there is no saas downturn caused by AI. wall street is just starting to say hang on a minute, why is this SaaS stock trading at a price to earnings ratio of 300? then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything
• tsunamifury 9mo ago
  Vibe coding seems to be the iPhone camera to DSLR moment for programming. - No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today. - Professional scoffed at it as a toy - The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain. The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.
• rubyfan 9mo ago
  “Software is eating the world” and “AI is eating software”
• jacobsenscott 9mo ago
  Remember when businesses ran on cobbled together access databases and vb? It was easier than building something ny prompting an llm.I made a good living just rewriting those things for them when they fell apart.
• TZubiri 9mo ago
  It seems like 'the market' is making this bet. I'm not deep into financial reports or whatever. But what I'm seeing from the tech side, this is not at all true. If anything B2B SaaS is growing with AI, and it hasn't even begun, the biggest AI markets right now are personal. The B2B market is up for grabs for sure, 0%-1% of niches have an LLM product right now. But traditional SaaS has a huge advantage, they have reams of industry specific data, and they have the customers, sure they will have competition, but they are the incumbents. If I had any money I'd buy the dip
• exizt88 9mo ago
  The reason for divergence is actually much simpler. NASDAQ 100 includes data center builders, Morgan Stanley software index doesn't. Stock market is going down across the board if you exclude data center construction.
• stevage 9mo ago
  Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.
  • danfritz 9mo ago
    Indeed totally unbearable to even read the article
  • rconti 9mo ago
    There's a lot of it in the article. Very distracting, I just didn't know what to call it (I searched for 'tail' before posting my own comment).
  • prdonahue 9mo ago
    I stopped reading the article because of it.
  • ralferoo 9mo ago
    Agreed. I thought it was weird on the ct ligature on something like the second sub heading and the next one had a st ligature. I stopped reading the article and was just scanning for st ligatures in the text itself (there are none) and then realised the main font was a less legible serif font and the headings that were bigger and shorter were sans serif which makes the ct and st ligatures stand out even more. I didn't read any more of the article after that, and the primary reason was just this weird font choice.
• rconti 9mo ago
  Wow, the tails on the lowercase letter 't' throughout that article are distracting.
• siliconc0w 9mo ago
  I think opensource is a good analogue here. For many SaaS products, you don't even need to vibecode anything - there is already a reasonable OSS alternative. Yet people still pay for the SaaS. They want support, maintainability, security, edemifcation, a throat to choke, regulation and domain expertise, etc. I do think like this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690) is a good example of where a custom more domain specific solution makes a lot more sense that dropping in an off-the-shelf ERP. Still though, I think the bakery would prefer to buy the bakery-ERP than build it but vibecoding does reduce the barrier to entry so we might see more competition and share taking from incumbents by domain-specialized new entrants.
• cyclo 9mo ago
  Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.
  • pixl97 9mo ago
    There's no shortage of restaurants that go out of business. Even big name brands have issues with location turnover.
    • _zagj 9mo ago
      That's a great point. The restaurant business is one of the worst you could possibly go into, with razor thin margins and astronomical failure rates. If those are the future economics of SaaS (accustomed to 70-80% gross margins), than you ought to cash out now while you still can.
• mycall 9mo ago
  > we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that. That is because AI is living in our world, instead of the opposite where we live in AI's world. Case in point: maybe the AI hallucinated a class method that never existed in our world yet, but perhaps in the AI led processes and workflows it would be written to better fit into the smooth gradient decent those same top parameters' scores.
• theturtletalks 9mo ago
  It’s not as far-fetched as people think. I see so many comments here doubting you can vibe code a full CRM or e-commerce SaaS, but a skilled AI-assisted programmer absolutely can, especially if they're aware of strong open-source alternatives already out there. For Salesforce-like CRM, there's Twenty[0], a good-enough alternative. For Shopify-style e-commerce, Medusa[1] is a headless commerce platform. The real power comes from using AI to study how these projects implement specific features (payments, inventory, customer dashboards, etc.) and adapt them to your stack. AI excels at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and grasping the full implementation. The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces otherwise. That's what I'm building at opensource.builders[2]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook with structured "skills" that point to exact details for reliable remixing and porting. SaaS companies are forever beholden to raising their market cap, even in solved spaces like cart, payment processing, and CRMs. Most businesses run on CRUD apps anyway, and if your core app exposes an API, you can build any customization you need on top of it. People here discounting how valuable it is for a business to have the software that runs their business on a tech stack they understand and something they truly own. [0] https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty [1] https://github.com/medusajs/medusa https://github.com/medusajs/medusa [2] https://opensource.builders https://opensource.builders
• pixl97 9mo ago
  At the end of the day you do not need to replace your B2B SaaS with AI. You need your B2B SaaS to think you can use AI to replace it though, so said SaaS will keep it's prices reasonable. Otherwise they have you by the balls and will charge you much as humanly possible.
• karmasimida 9mo ago
  It is obvious. A middle 100-500 heads firm don't need enterprise level SaaS, a vibe coded website will suit them better. Fundamentally, those workflow/orchestration SaaS needs to answer the question why people should pay you premium while only getting 80% where they want to be.
• ghshephard 9mo ago
  Lot of places that I see AI disrupting - I'm not buying that SaaS is going to be a significant one. Reading through the article: > They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 Couple things we needed to understand here: - How large is the client company - Is that $30,000/month or day or hour.... If it's a technology company of > 1000 employees - then $30,000 month doesn't even get Finance's attention. And there is next to zero chance that anyone is going to vibe-code, deploy, support and run anything in a 1000 person+ company for $30,000 a month. SaaS wins hands down. Any product/service that people care about comes with a pager rotation - which is 6-7 employees making > $200k/year. If you can offload that responsibility to a SaaS for < $1mmm/year - done deal.
  • zipy124 9mo ago
    Yeh but in a company of 100 employees for software of 30k a year, it's more than worth it to take your standard 50k (GBP) dev and have them replaced it. It's a one time cost, and the support time will certainly be less than 50% of their time every year so it saves money. There are many companies that operate like this all over the world. Outside of the hyper-growth tech VC world cutting costs is a very real target and given how cheap Devs are outside of America it's almost always worth it.
    • ghshephard 9mo ago
      $30k/year? For 100 Employees. So - $25/seat? I can't imagine it would ever be worth, under any scenario, trying to write/build/support any $25/seat SaaS software for any company I've worked at in 25+ years. Another thing to keep in mind - very little of the cost of a SaaS license is the time it takes to build the software. Security, Support, Maintenance, Administration, backups/restores, testing/auditing said backups/restores, etc, etc.. and then x-training new SREs on how to support/manage this software, ... Even as someone who spend 10+ hours a day churning out endless LLM applications, products, architectures from my myriad of Cursor/Codex/CC interfaces and agents - I'm dubious that LLMs will ever eat into SaaS revenue. I'm sure (lots of) people will try - and then 1-2 years in someone will look at the pain, and just pull the ripcord.
• karmasimida 9mo ago
  I think people here need to accept that software is becoming electricity, you get charged when you use it and by how much. You don't pay for a box shaped electricity or purple color electricity, it is just electricity.
• thallavajhula 9mo ago
  I was reading through the article and waiting for the key info to drop, but nope. It never did. It seemed like marketing fluff. If anything, vibe coding may eliminate some of the B2C SaaSes, but not B2B. If you think an enterprise is going to vibe code a B2B offering that they pay millions for, you're out of your mind. Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it. CEOs of companies that train and offer LLMs, Authors of Books about LLMs and AI in general, etc. This may come off as an unpopular opinion, but this is how I felt after listening to Steve Yegge recently. He has a new book about Vibe coding and he goes on in the interview/podcast to say that the best programmers he knows in the world (the ones better than him and maybe even the top world class programmers), would be equivalent to those of interns in an year, if they don't start vibe coding or use AI. I respect the guy, but damn, this is just peak delusion. He didn't even say it as a hyperbole, he meant it. According to popular CEOs of companies training LLMs, 2024 was supposed to be the year that would eliminate the need for Junior and mid-level engineers. 2025 happened. Now, we are in 2026. So yeah, I'm never taking advice about AI from these people ever again.
  • torginus 9mo ago
    > Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it I get where you're coming from, but let's say you're talking to a HVAC installer, and he recommends you a system to get - I'm sure there's financial self-interest on his part, but I do like to think that he knows quite a bit about what he does, and believes what he's selling is genuinely good stuff (and has reason to), even if he oversells it a bit.
    • thallavajhula 9mo ago
      True. That's the case with almost any commodity in life. That's why I was specific about AI. The difference is, in other sectors, there's no fear-mongering. If you don't use their HVAC, it's fine. Your job isn't getting replaced. The air you breathe in your home isn't going to be fully polluted. You have other options. With AI though, there's no middle ground. You either use their tool and become extremely successful (so much that you don't know what to do with that much success) or you're out of a job and become obsolete in like the next 3 seconds.
• eek2121 9mo ago
  I am kind of hoping that AI will kill the startup grab for money TBH. Too many wannabe CEOs I've met in the past 2 decades have gotten rich thanks to a lucky pitch without a clear path to a viable product. At least 6 of those I know did so at the expense of developers that accepted equity over cash...and the developers wasted a ton of time and 2 even were briefly homeless as a result...and none of them live in California. Hopefully wannabe senior leadership will try and take advantage of AI without taking advantage of developers, because most of us just want to write code and build something great.
• yalogin 9mo ago
  AI, as do most things, help the big players get bigger. If someone is automating small parts of the b2b layer they get dropped, but it’s harder to drop an automation that companies are used to. I don’t see how AI is changing that, companies spent a lot of time and money to set up the automation because it’s needed and because they can write a potential replacement cheaply doesn’t mean they are going to rip away something that works and is reliable.
• eitally 9mo ago
  I predict the fallout from this is companies being nickel & dimed to death by a million smaller subscriptions (rather than just cutting a huge check to Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle or similar). There is such a glut of AI ISV startups that are filling highly specific niches, and some are quite good, but they're all usually in the $10-50/mo/user. Gets to be big numbers pretty quickly in a large enterprise.
• aetherspawn 9mo ago
  No.. just.. no. This will be a thing for like 1, maybe 2 years, then people will realise it doesn’t make sense to spend $50K of time per annum to replace a $500/month subscription for a better product.
• btown 9mo ago
  > What they don’t know, though, is that a poorly architected system will fail, eventually. As every senior programmer (eventually) understands, our job is complex because we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that. I have a strong feeling the future's going to look like this: Company vibe codes to replace a SaaS. Little do they know this creates a time bomb: fragile systems where fundamental architectural defects are papered over by humans who knew the underlying dynamics but didn't articulate them well enough during the initial "vibe-architecture," so they're forced to patching the "impedance mismatches" with data entry or with even more vibe coding. Those humans are eventually laid off, because of course they are. Data quality rapidly deteriorates. Operational mishaps deteriorate relationships with human counterparties. Defects begin to cost thousands to millions. Suddenly, there's demand: not for SaaS, but for actual service businesses. Consultancies that can parachute in, do actual domain-driven design, and un-vibe that code. They do have a stronger-than-ever pool of out-of-work engineers (many from the failed SaaS companies). The SaaS companies that survive understand that the first S no longer stands for Software; it stands for Solutions.
  • gbriel 9mo ago
    You're assuming that code in the future will need to be unvibed. Either the code will be good, or AI will be good enough to unvibe it. That might be awhile in the future but it will happen.
    • yieldcrv 9mo ago
      > or AI will be good enough to unvibe it it already is just point Claude Code at a Claude Code codebase you forgot about for a few weeks with no plan.md or agents.md or memory.md implemented configure the session correctly this time and put it in plan mode, it will deal with your whole database schemas, migrate, tie everything to the new models correctly, make a backend deployment script, and fix your UI/UX
      • ryaniscool 9mo ago
• mvkel 9mo ago
  It's this generation's "build vs buy." I imagine it will play out the same way, like a revolving door. Customers churn because they can "build it themselves," then a year later when they're sick of maintaining a mess of code for some internal system instead of delivering value to their own customers, they come back. A blip.
• sreekanth850 9mo ago
  Build infra heavy saas. Somehow can get through. Llm will get better only, and people start copying every sucessfull platforms.
• willtemperley 9mo ago
  I think there may be other factors killing SaaS, particularly data sovereignty. "According to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey from June 2025, 45% of all organizations and 56% of “digital natives” cited data sovereignty and potential cloud changes as their greatest concern for 2026." https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-365.html https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-3...
• softwaredoug 9mo ago
  Sure its fun to (vibe) code some internal version for a SaaS, but maintain it month after month? Maintain SLAs, etc? That's not fun. Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does the internal dev really want to deal with the care and feeding of the random shitty timesheet app they created? Do they want to take on the work of integrating random backend systems that timesheet system needs to talk to? Do they want to get called at 3AM when it's down? Even AI assisted, living year after year with production systems is hard.
• keeptrying 9mo ago
  SaaS dying is mostly nonsense. Which is easier to vibecode - AI agent or Salesforce? The fragmentation in the AI agent space will be markedly larger than at the base CRM layer. Abd the AI agent is replaceable in under a minute but your data in Salesforce isn’t.
• CyanLite2 9mo ago
  The real story isn't that some enterprise mega corp is going to vibe-code their own Workday. The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.
  • gondar 9mo ago
    But if you are a mega corp, spending 0.1% of your CapEx on SaaS subscriptions, do you really want to switch to products made by some no name one person startup? You might save 0.05% of your CapEx, but if something didn’t workout, your whole business will be screwed.
    • CyanLite2 9mo ago
      To your point, I think there are 3 main categories: 1. Too big to fail (SalesForce, ServiceNow, ServiceTitan, Shopify). They’re targeting megacorps’ core business operations. Switching costs are too high. They will survive, 2. B2B non-core (PagerDuty, Vanta, Monday, Atlassian). They’re going to have stiff competition and most here will fail or merge/consolidate. They have the most to lose because they’re non-core to a business’s success and pricing pressures will cause many of them will be easily vibecoded with enough time. The large TAM here will attract hundreds of competitors each. 3. Consumer SaaS (Notion, Canva, Grammarly, Dribbble). They're good as dead and can be buried.
• tqi 9mo ago
  There is no evidence presented that internally "vibe coded" products are the reason hubspot et al are struggling right now. If anything, the fact that the divergence from the broader index starts in April of last year (well before the current vibe coding moment got going) is evidence that this is something else.
• nprateem 9mo ago
  The problem is never building, it's maintenance. SaaS isn't going anywhere.
• scott-iii 9mo ago
  been thinking about this too. the middleware layer is getting decimated first
• joeyguerra 9mo ago
  That’s cool. I’m building a mob programmer.
• ast0708 9mo ago
  How corporate incentives are aligned will also define the trajectory. The person who is going to take the call whether to go for vibe coded tool or external vendor has to have enough incentive to put this neck on the line. Imagine this, you are VP of finance. You know you can get a nice tax calculator built quickly using vibe coding, but will you put your neck on the line and say, let's replace the existing vendor and use my vibe coded tool. You might fired if you send a wrong tax report to your auditor. Let's take another example - VP of sales wants performance report and visuazliation of the sales team. He has 200 BDRs. The daily sales standup depends on this report, team gets yelled at or praised basis this. Now, will this VP be willing to put his neck on the line and say - let's use my vibe coded report and discard the existing SaaS. Even if such a report feels trivial, it is vital for functioning the sales team and hence, it needs to be reliable. I think vibe coding will work at prototype level - the trust gap is very huge right now to even consider it for internal tools. And, until vibe coded tools are stress tested enough this trust gap will not be fulfilled. Think about this, why some of the biggest companies in the world still run on softwares built in 2000s.
• featherlark 9mo ago
  Honestly, I'm surprised by how people are pushing back against this idea. I feel like vibe coding is just in its earliest moments of actual viability, and my mind is totally blown by it, and it strikes me that it's exactly what I've always wished software could be. Plastic, flexible, personalized, effective, responsive, organic. As an anecdote, I've been vibe coding an accounting system that perfectly matches with my own expectations of accounting software, i.e., it's intimately connected to CSVs, imports and exports from CSVs, but acts as a kind of enrichment and reporting and file association layer. If there was anything like this, any kind of SaaS that I could have and download as software and run on my own computer offline and be able to inspect and trust and version control so they wouldn't add or remove some kind of feature that I wanted down the line, then I would have gone with that. But now I have essentially my absolute ideal solution, written with a Python backend and Vue and JavaScript frontend, and it's radically improved my ability to maintain accounting for our business account. And I think there's something really important to point out here, which is that the feeling of lock-in is very seriously reduced when you are Vibe coding your own software, because if you don't like the way that it works or you realize that there's something missing, you can add it pretty painlessly. Like, that's always been a huge challenge with choosing vendors for a SaaS platform, is you think, oh no, well, what if their conceptual model for what I'm trying to do doesn't quite map onto our own internal systems or understanding of what's being done? Well, when you have your own Vibe-coded SaaS, you can just add that information. So there's something incredibly organic about it. I used to work at a startup in Redmond where we built this large internal system to manage a scientific process with lots of machinery and data, and it was incredibly empowering and actually became one of the core values of the business that was able to be licensed to other businesses in the same industry. And it seems like we're just improving that capacity from here. Now obviously, if Vibe Coding magically were to go away or became much more expensive, then I'd have this legacy piece of software, which I couldn't improve, and that would be a dead end. But my expectation is that the functionality that we have today will only improve. And in several years, the scope of changes that I'll be able to make, the level of professionalism, modularization, maintainability, code quality, will only improve. And so this has me thinking in general that software is kind of undergoing a step change where we're moving into the so-called age of intent beyond the age of the interface. And that's tremendously exciting to me, and I just couldn't be more stoked about it.
• jillesvangurp 9mo ago
  It's the opposite IMHO. AI is enabling a lot more B2B SaaS. There are a lot of companies that are running on outdated software. Especially in manufacturing and industry. They've had decades of experience with very expensive IT projects where cost got out of hand because things just are very complicated in the real world. There are many millions of companies that are going to be re-examining if they can do better in the next years. The work will still be very complicated but with the help of AI, small IT shops might just deliver enough value to be worth the trouble. The notion of e.g. busy floor plant/logistics managers vibe coding this themselves is silly. 1) they don't have the time; these people are super busy 2) they lack the ability. 3) they'll want it done properly 4) their employers won't skip all the certifications, iso stuff, and what not. Companies invest in SAAS software if it delivers some kind of revenue/profit benefits. If it's too expensive/complex, it can't do that. AI tools lower the cost of SAAS solutions. So the totally addressable market grows. Companies will want to maximize their ROI though. So, they'll do the usual and engage software companies and integrators to help them do this. They'll expect to pay less for more. And there will be lots of haggling around that topic. But there's an enormous amount of companies that are quite far behind on getting their operations into this century in terms of IT already. There are going to be early adopters looking for early successes here that will put pressure on their competitors if they are successful. I'm running a small company in this space. We're seeing a lot of opportunities right now. And AI is making my work massively easier already. All those complex ERP integrations just became an order of magnitude easier to do with a small team. They are still hard though. Forget about vibe coding that. You need a plan.
• christkv 9mo ago
  There will be an exiting explosion of internal apps and tools and then it will die down as companies get back to business. All those tools and apps will turn into legacy apps and they will eventually try to migrate data off them into some saas platform because its not core to business. Saas will have to drop prices to be competitive so fat margins will go away which will probably affect margins for AWS etc.
• yyyk 9mo ago
  Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46268452
• lws9262 9mo ago
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• _zagj 9mo ago
  I'm not one to sell generative AI short at this point, but this seems at odds with the longer-term trend towards more centralized, off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify, Salesforce, Squarespace, over the "bespoke," in-house alternatives that many companies developed in previous decades. Perhaps AI is making the TCO of "rolling your own" so low that it makes sense to go back to that over SaaS?
• keyle 9mo ago
  Vibe coded SaaS is a SaaTA. Throw away.
• aenis 9mo ago
  Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want to wire together. I dont think going back to having own developers, owning the code is going to be a bad financial propositions for such companies. My company is now one month into trying this out and so far, so good. We kicked our outsystems addiction and are just went live with a react rewrite - and are well into rewriting an expensive to run document management system which we were at the same time under-utilizing and abusing. Our product people are loving it since for the first time in ages we dont need to tell them "well that would be real hard, considering we have salesforce crap underneath and it just doesnt do this or that well".
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    That sounds great. What SaaS are you replacing?
    • aenis 9mo ago
      I'd rather not name names - but one of the major, popular ones. We contracted a lot of usage, and are using it literally like a S3 bucket with a malware scanner attached to it, and ignoring the dozens and dozens of document management capabilities it has - that we don't need. (Because really, we only ever needed a S3 bucket with a virus scanner...). This alone will allow us not to renew that contract, and save, maybe, around 2M per year. Sure, we will have to have our own API that will require support and what not, but... we already HAD to have our own API that requires support and what not, since we have a bunch of legacy document management platforms running in various countries, and we anyway have to operate an abstraction and a router. I am sure ours might not be the most typical case, but there will be savings, and since the economy is what it is, my bosses are telling me to go for every saving I can find, and thats one of them. (I'd not try to re-write an ERP system, for instance, or a CRM. But a lot of smaller things where we pay a substantial premium? Sure - we will try.).
  • 9mo ago
• simonjgreen 9mo ago
  Slight tangent: what’s the deal with the weird ligatures on that page in the headings?
  • namanyayg 9mo ago
    I'm the biggest typography nerd and love ligatures. Can't tell if the majority likes them or dislikes them lol
• ManuelKiessling 9mo ago
  Just a single data point, and I‘m not pretending it’s a conclusive one (yet), but I think there is a middle ground between buying a SaaS and vibe coding a replacement: replacing a SaaS with your own solution, using AI coding agents — while actually knowing what you do because creating robust software in-house is already a core competency. No vibe coding needed. At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board. We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing). Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages. So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No. It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal. Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case. So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor. But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of. So we sat down and built https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/ It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works. And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators. We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp
• ensocode 9mo ago
  I wouldn't see it positive that we just need to rethink and offer platforms. As this platforms already exist Azure, AWS, GCP
• port11 9mo ago
  AI is killing this. Millennials are killing that. Gen Z certainly must be killing another thing. And Yarn? It was killing NPM. This nonsense type of title really was made for a world where nuance doesn’t exist. B2B SaaS is projected to grow over the next decade, not shrink. Just use the LLMs and you’ll be reminded of the value provided by the company selling non-core but important tools for your business.
• AtomicLynx 9mo ago
  Look, software is not going away even though everybody thinks they're a developer now. Do you think companies are going to replace Microsoft Windows, of which there are a billion installs, or Salesforce, Crowdstrike, Quickbooks etc, with some Vibe coded AI slop an intern "coded"? When enterprises/businesses in general upgrade any software in the company it takes years sometimes... There is also Vendor lock in, you can't just swap things with vibe-coded slop, and trust me your manager will never want to do that either because his butt will be on the line.
• bilekas 9mo ago
  > how they’re potentially losing an $X00,000 account just because the customer can’t use a specific failure reporting workflow in the SaaS. They’re now working with me to build what the customer needs and retain them. You mean the poor SaaS company actually now has to implement features needed by customers?? Jesus wept.
• techpulse_x 9mo ago
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• mid_haggl 9mo ago
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• cdf 9mo ago
  The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service. In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service. Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.
• nicman23 9mo ago
  goooood.
• genC_old_one 9mo ago
  Jellyfish is a Jolly Fish, also invertebrate
• RT_max 9mo ago
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• philipmoses 9mo ago
  It’s about the "Per User Tax" The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database. I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an AI agent that can build me a custom version in a week? So, we did exactly that. We used Claude and Cursor to "vibe-code" EZTest. A 100% open source, self hosted alternative that does 90% of what the expensive SaaS tools do, but with zero recurring fees and total data ownership. The market is crashing because the "Application Layer" has been commoditized. If you can build and own your infrastructure for the cost of a few API calls, the era of renting basic software is over. We aren't just building a tool; we're proving that the "SaaS Tax" is now optional.
  • donohoe 9mo ago
    That’s great. The overhead is that you have to host it and maintain the environment and app. If there is downtime that’s now your responsibility. If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.
    • hermannj314 9mo ago
      Is there a middle ground that hasn't emerged yet? Someone to host and manage your SLop-As-A-Serivce (SLAAS) for a price point in the middle. That feels like a business.
      • rafterydj 9mo ago
        Hey, that sounds like OpenAI!
  • another_twist 9mo ago
    Literally everything is a UI atop a database. Writing the data models, crafting the right uI and the right flows is non trivial. It requires iteration and that refinement is what customers pay for. The reality with SaaS stocks is they dont make anything critical. eg Take any large consumer tech company and they dont use Klaviyo. These companies build their own stack and one thats intimately connected with the data lake. It works for tech companies since they hve good data and it doesng work for non-tech companies because a good fraction of their data is trash.
• the_harpia_io 9mo ago
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  • jdthedisciple 9mo ago
    why does half of your comment read like it was written by AI?
    • the_harpia_io 9mo ago
      [flagged]
• nutanc 9mo ago
  Lets break this down. There is very little in newness in what Anthropic announced. Claude had skills for a long time. They have added one more layer of abstraction and called it plugins. This mainly comes with a set of integrations. Thats the pitch. But, what are Claude plugins? Plugins=Commands+Skills+Integrations. Commands are specific to Claude code. But commands and skills are nothing but prompts at their basest level. So what is the main differentiator? Integrations. But what are you integrating with? SaaS companies. And what is the stock market doing? Dumping SaaS stocks. How do they think Claude cowork will work without the integrations. Without the system of records. If anything, these SaaS products have become more important. If I was a trading guy, I would go to the github of claude plugins, see the default integrations and buy the stock of those companies.
• Lucasoato 9mo ago
  I wouldn't say that AI is killing B2B SaaS, let's analyze the situation: AI is shifting the boundaries of the Build VS Buy decision. If software is cheaper... building it seems a much better option but... ...the fact that software is cheaper means that SaaS companies will be able to be more competitive with price, offering more features, integrating them much better with the newest agentic tools and frameworks that are getting released. Sure, the market will adjust, some will be pushed away, others will find businesses that weren't possible before... but we're far away (I hope) from the AGI revolution, don't forget to see this crysis as an opportunity too.
• thinkindie 9mo ago
  I have few sticks in the sand in my thinking framework: * writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes * there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc. * along the same line, some of those open source projects offer self-hosting and cloud version: I would always personally go for the cloud version because in a small team I don't want to operate something that other people built and I don't know how to operate. That's not my job not my team job * people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software, which is something that goes beyond the adrenaline rush you get after "building" something with Lovable or similar tools. Also, I find it extremely easy to get 80% done quickly but excruciatingly slow to get things done right. * I still see huge value in using tools like Lovable to build a working prototype and validate assumptions so that you get quickly build the right thing right solving the right problem in the right away avoiding waste * camcorders have been around for ages but you don't have millions of directors around just because you make a tool more accessible * same can be said for other things like restaurants, where sometimes it's more convenient (although expensive) to buy vs build.
  • thinkindie 9mo ago
    and also: * several companies require their tool to have several certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001 etc etc), how this will work with vibe coded tools?
  • fer 9mo ago
    >people are underestimating how draining is operating and maintaining software Yep. Many SaaS have an edge because they factorize the struggle of many customers, if a SaaS has 1000 customers, each customer vibing their way into a home-built solution will require dedicated efforts at maintaining it. Even with AI, those efforts aren't negligible. Many companies don't even operate any IT infrastructure, cloud or otherwise, themselves, beyond office connectivity, AI replacing SaaS will require someone in charge of that at the very least.
    • 8mo ago
• known 9mo ago
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• dart200 9mo ago
  for profit software is pretty gross tho. it can be made indefinitely complex, and people can make and sell tools to patchwork the complexity together, but then u need more tools to patchwork all the tools together ... and u end up in aggregators aggregated aggregators type situation where optimal solutions never arise because we don't actually cooperate enough to produce them ai is fitting into the notion that this is all bullshit ... even if not in the correct way
• jdthedisciple 9mo ago
  This feels like it started out being written by a human but around the point "2. Security, authentication, and robustness" the LLM took over and finished it...
• tedggh 9mo ago
  Are there real documented cases of a company replacing their SaS with a vibe-coded version? Like I can see how a very small company could replace a portion of an overkill and underutilized SaS platform. I don’t see how a larger more complex business could replace their SAP or ADP with a vibecoded version. These stories are all very similar in where the author knows some CEO of an obscure company who told them they had an engineer reverse engineer and vibecode some obscure SaS solution and saved them $50K.
• Ekaros 9mo ago
  Or maybe there is look at true value proposition of the B2B SaaS products. It is not big spend per user, but it does add up eventually. And then savings start to look like big numbers. Big enough for some manager to justify action. This might lead cutting some seats just on cost basis.
• laurentiurad 9mo ago
  What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive. It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services. Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.
  • dbuxton 9mo ago
    I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable. Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved. Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.
  • Multiplayer 9mo ago
    The software industry moat is disappearing. What will happen is 1000 (10,000?) competitors putting price pressure on every saas app. Software will cease to be a winner take all and be a very long tail distribution!
    • laurentiurad 9mo ago
      Where are all these 1000 competitors coming from? You need to have tremendous agency/will to start competing with a public company. Plus, you need to have a lot of distribution channels, competing with sales people that do this for a living since ages, and marketing budgets that are higher than your annual Claude spending. Regular people do not press 10 clicks daily to track their calories, and you're saying that they will start competing with Salesforce and the like?
• Pbhaskal 9mo ago
  One point is now you dont have to pay money to 3rd world countries like mine :(, you can manage with fewer resources inhouse. AI will take care of slop work.
• gcanyon 9mo ago
  People have been debating what "real" development is for as long as there have been computers. "That's not real software development, you're not even controlling which registers you use!" "How can you say that's real code when you aren't even managing your own memory!" "That doesn't look like C, must not be code!" and on and on. At the level of the old adage about whether the horse-drawn buggy-makers are in the buggy business or the transportation business, it's all telling the computer what to do in the context of providing a customized tool that you or others might use. So in this context, a customized Excel spreadsheet counts. And so does a vibe-coded app. And of course, wringing our hands about what it looks like now totally ignores the fact that it's not going to be like this for more than a year or two at most. How long until a user can reasonably say to Claude or similar, "I need Bob here to track production at my factory. Lay out a set of tools to do that, and make sure they're layered with help and tutorials so Bob can learn on the job because he doesn't know anything. Don't let him make any mistakes." That's probably not coming next year, but certainly it's not ten years away.
• podgorniy 9mo ago
  We will have to go through the stage of disillusionment of what AI is and understanding of what it is not. There is too much FOMO and too many stories driven by the heavy-AI-invested parties today to see thing clearly.
• jacquesm 9mo ago
  It kills low hanging fruit SaaS that was always just some minor piece of functionality wrapped in a subscription model usually based on 99% open source and 1% actual contribution.
• another_twist 9mo ago
  This was the same hype around NoCode a few years ago. Thing is people for software as a service and internal teams dont want to do the service part. A common thread among all of the vibe coded stuff I hear is that nobody talks about the next requirement which was handled. Frankly UIs are learnable and after a few tries everybody gets used to it. The extra polish is totally not worth it. Eventually every SaaS on the non-critical business path gets ripped out with one of the platform players such as SAP, SalesForce etc which are infinitely customizable. Salesforce even has its own language in which customers write their apps. The system of record bit is quite correct and imo the only durable advantage. But that doesnt explain why Klaviyo shoyld worry. In fact marketing workflows are some of the most important systems of record directly tied to business earnings. The assumtpion that in SaaS you build once and everybody uses it is false. There are always customizations or features that need to be built for big contracts. Its the small players that are okay with out of the box SaaS since they lack the budget to pay for a customization. Ironically, these teams will get hurt the most should they choose to go down the vibe code everything path. Here infra capex is far lower than payroll and owning too much software (vibe coded or not) will simply steal time from business development. Honestly, the market just panicked and caused a temporary correction thats all. Then we all got busy and wrote a bunch of thought leadership crap on top. In reality AI is the best thing to happen to SaaS companies since it reduces RnD time and expenses, allows even small players to bid for large contracts without overloading existing dev capacity and also makes it possible to put devs in front of customers since now there's no need to sit down and code. AI is also the best thing to happen to engineering since it now allows for product management to be folded into the existing craft.
• itay-maman 9mo ago
  The term "B2B SaaS" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and I think conflates two different things: (1) Business model: hosted software you pay monthly for (vs self-hosted/one-time purchase) (2) "Glue" products: tools like Monday.com that primarily provide synergy between data sources and workflows The article is really about (2) - and yes, those are vulnerable to vibe-coding. If your product's core value is "we connect X to Y and show you a dashboard," that's now a weekend project. But there's a huge category of SaaS where the value is in the product itself, not the integration layer. Take Excalidraw - fits the SaaS model, but try vibe-coding a collaborative whiteboard with real-time sync, proper data persistence, conflict resolution, export formats, etc. The hard problems aren't "connect API A to API B." Or PostHog - sure you could vibe-code some analytics tracking, but building reliable event ingestion at scale, session replay, feature flags with proper rollout controls? That's years of engineering. The "vibecodeable" SaaS products were always somewhat commoditized - AI just accelerated the timeline. The ones solving genuinely hard technical problems seem a lot safer to me.
• erelong 9mo ago
  Sounds like a lot of products will be in trouble if AI becomes more advanced with producing secure code with maintenance processes to keep evaluating code on an ongoing basis
• WarmWash 9mo ago
  Customers don't want to pay for rolodex + 8000-data-point-visulization + integrated-automatic-contact-form-filling + assisted-real-time-closest-contact-scanning + 15 new-features-months + Annual-UI-rewrites + All-that-amazing-businesses-functionality-for-only-$199/usr/mo. They want AI to vibecode a rolodex. And just use that. For 30 years if needed. 2000 LOC and a one time $20 cost. The cancer of SaaS cannot die fast enough.
  • throw272526277 9mo ago
    Any competent programmer can write 2000 lines in a few days or less. If the SaaS could be replaced by that no AI would be needed.
• drdrek 9mo ago
  Can't wait for the "AI Is supercharging SAAS" article when the stocks go up, and another "SAAS IS DEAD" when they go down again
• nilkn 9mo ago
  It really isn't. Nobody's migrating their payroll vendor to some vibecoded app. I agree with Jensen Huang that this reaction doesn't make sense at all. My own prediction is that reliable vibecoding will be additive. It's a new capability that will help high-agency people do things faster or answer questions they couldn't easily answer before. Need to spin up a big custom Monte Carlo calculation and want a simple UI to control and configure it? You can just throw that together now. Need to get a draft budget allocation for a big set of projects calibrated against a set of conflicting constraints? Let an agent crank at it for a couple hours, then review and refine manually -- or just toss it out if you don't like it. But building, running, and maintaining production-grade services or apps that the company relies on for its basic functioning? You're not just paying the SaaS vendor for having built the product -- you're paying them to maintain it, run it, and respond to issues promptly. You're also paying them to keep building it and improving it over time. To be clear, I think there are certainly cases where the rise of "coding AGI" is going to lead companies to build some services internally versus buying from a vendor, but I predict these will be highly custom and bespoke services that are too tailored for a specific corporation to make sense for a third-party vendor to try to sell.
• schnable 9mo ago
  Article is AI slop based on a mostly made up premise.
• jeffkumar 9mo ago
  Great insights Namanyay! I feel the same way about needing to build platforms that enable companies to build on top. That's why i'm building adventureflow.ai to enable energy companies to build their agentic workflows directly on top of my platform. The expectations have completely changed now, customers expect more software for less, because it is 5-10x cheaper now or faster to build and there's no changing that. Tools like Opus 4.5 have completely disrupted the software marketplace!
• amadeuspagel 9mo ago
  Salesforces market cap today is 180,35B. That, not the change, is the market's judgement of how valuable salesforce is, despite any risk from AI. If salesforce stock drops with a new AI model that doesn't mean that investors think salesforce is worthless. It means a slight risk to their business is getting priced in.
• purplepatrick 9mo ago
  SaaS’s competitive advantage is not tech but distribution. Just because the stock market dips, and a bunch of media outlets ascribe this to AI doesn’t mean that AI ‘caused’ the dip. If people really think non-tech businesses will start running their own software organizations and maintain all these tools themselves is an idiotic assumption at best. The “building” of software has never been and will never be the bottleneck.
• kajolshah_bt 8mo ago
  I don’t think AI is killing B2B SaaS. It’s exposing what was already broken. A lot of legacy SaaS shipped features that never solved real customer problems; AI just makes that obvious because users now expect intelligence and responsiveness. The products that survive are the ones that use AI to solve actual friction points, not just add another automation toggle. In our work, we’ve seen features like AI search and guided workflows improve retention only when they reduce manual effort and are trusted by users. If an AI feature feels like a gimmick, people ignore it. So I’d reframe it: AI is accelerating differentiation, not destroying the category.
• XCSme 8mo ago
  Yeah, SaaS tools start feeling bloated fast. I switched to self-hosting analytics so I could track user behavior properly without paying per seat. Was messing around with Grafana and other stuff, but for session replays and metrics I built UXWizz. Gives me everything self-hosted and avoids those crazy per-user bills [0]. [0] https://www.uxwizz.com https://www.uxwizz.com