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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 r
by kriro 8mo 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 8mo agohard 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 8mo agoPerhaps 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 8mo agoTailwindUI 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 8mo agoTailwindUI 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
- re-thc 8mo ago> I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS. How is it in any way B2B? At most B2C + freelancers / individuals / really small SME. It didn't have any clues a med/large B2B would look for e.g. SSO, SOC2 and other security measures. It doesn't target reusability that I as a B would want. The provided blocks never work together. There aren't reusable components. Tailwind UI or now Tailwind Plus is more like vibe coding pre-AI.
- mbesto 8mo ago> we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS. This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
- sramam 8mo agoThese examples are going to be lagging indicators of the underlying sentiment. Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this. Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
- recursive 8mo agoI too have an appetite for magic beans, but unfortunately, I'll be unable to eat them until they exist. As it stands now, it doesn't seem like AI stuff can produce anything with this large a scope.
- generic92034 8mo agoSo, do their AI devs have deep knowledge of the business processes, regulations/legal (of course in all kinds of regions), scaling, security, ... ? Because the LLMs sure as hell are lacking that knowledge (again, in depth). Of course, once AGI is available (if it is ever) everything changes. But for now someone needs to have the deep expertise.
- mikeocool 8mo agoI have heard this from execs at public companies as well. I think a HUGE part of this appetite is that today no one has yet been subjected to doing business on a bunch of apps cobbled together by vibe coders. They are just hearing the promise that AI will allow them to build custom software that perfectly melds to their needs in no time at all, and think it sounds great. I suspect the early adopters who go this route are going to be in for a rude awakening that AI hasn’t actually solved a lot of hard problems in custom software development.
- codegeek 8mo agoSorry but tailwindui is not a SAAS. There is no service or hosting. You buy a coded template once and then receive updates. It is totally not the same as a critical B2B SAAS that is running 24-7 on the vendor's servers providing real support and service.
- jabroni_salad 8mo agoThere is a paradigm shift but personally I like to zoom out a little: It used to be that your new b2b product has to try and displace a spreadsheet. Now it has to displace an agent.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- colechristensen 8mo agoI'm considering SaaS replacements with in house code in situations where my general thoughts are "how can this possibly be the pricing for this?" which is not uncommon.
- monero-xmr 8mo agoWell before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything
- echelon 8mo agoHow many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating? These are real risks to these companies. Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
- falloutx 8mo ago> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous. If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
- echelon 8mo agoI, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got. B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds. Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go. I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water. If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
- falloutx 8mo ago> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
- echelon 8mo agoMetrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data. We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it. Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
- orochimaaru 8mo agoWhat agents are you using? If you stick to opentelemetry and open source agents and develop a collector infrastructure - You can switch across different vendors with lower impact and ramp off time. Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.
- llmslave 8mo agohow dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins. i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
- AstroBen 8mo agoAtlassian: surviving since 2002 because no-one could previously build a kanban board or project management app
- no_wizard 8mo agoI think the value is lost on the end user, but it’s more readily apparent to everyone above them. I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc. Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira
- 9dev 8mo agoDid vanilla Jira for a while, battled with a web app that is actively trying to make you hate it—switched our team to Linear, couldn't be happier ever since.
- no_wizard 8mo agoAs far as the Atlassian suite goes I do much prefer Trello. I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically
- llmslave 8mo agono the difference is 90% cost savings, which was previously impossible
- xhrpost 8mo agoReminds me of a blog post a while back saying that gigabit fiber at home would lead to everyone running their own email server.
- isk517 8mo agoThere was no chance that everyone would be running their own email server, but if it wasn't for the lack of IPv6 adaptation a plug and go home email server solution would probably see a decent amount of use. I'd bet we'd already be seeing it as a feature in most mid-ranged home routers by now.
- rvnx 8mo agoThe mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is: 1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries) and most of all: 2) "Trust"/"Spam score" It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted. If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
- cadamsdotcom 8mo agoThe specific concern around uptime & reliability was baked into email systems from almost the start - undeliverable notifications (for the sender) and retries. But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
- Ucalegon 8mo agoIts not a device/MTA issue, SMTP just is not a secure protocol and there is not much you can do in order to 'secure' human communication. Things like spoofing or social engineering are near impossible to address within SMTP without external systems doing some sort of analysis on the messages or in combination with other protocols like DNS.
- stronglikedan 8mo agoB2B is a large corp is like you describe, but it's very different in SMBs, and there are many, many more SMBs.
- MrDresden 8mo agoMy experience is that SMBs are generally not run by people who feel confident doing any kind of self managed IT. No amount of LLM usage is going to change them into full stack vibe coders who moonlight as sysadmins. I just don't see it happening. Not until, that is, a new generation, that has grown accustomed to the tech, takes over. Until then the current SMBs will for the most part fulfill their IT needs from SaaS businesses (of which I think there will be more due to LLMs lowering the barrier for those of us who feel confident in our coding and sysadmin skills already).
- graemep 8mo agoWhat new generation? Younger generations are less accustomed to self-managed tech.
- coolgoose 8mo agoThis 100% most of new devices are locked, mobile etc.
- healthy_throw 8mo agoI assume a vibe coded agent would moonlight as the sysadmin to maintain the vibe coded LoB app.
- theappsecguy 8mo agoHaving seen how clueless the new generation is and the amount of brain rot they get from using LLMs over honing their own skills, I'd say it's the opposite...
- vonneumannstan 8mo agoSo how much Constellation Software stock are you buying since the market seems to think they are dead in the water after a 50% drawdown?
- chiffre01 8mo agoThe reality is anyone generate useful code with an AI agent now. Dores in accounting can now automate all her spreadsheets in a single afternoon. Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
- apsurd 8mo agoThe accounting saas dores presumably uses doesn't "automate spreadsheets" as its core value prop. related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
- emptyfile 8mo ago[dead]
- brikym 8mo agoMaybe you are right and the companies do want to pay and not worry about these problems. But now they have a lot more SaaS options to chose from. The incumbent companies like Salesforce and Atlassian have less of a moat. Maybe they'll keep the power users but if a customer is only using 80% of the feature set there is new competition. Competition might come in the form of a startup but it can also come from existing SaaS companies expanding into adjacent domains. Canva now does docs. Notion does email. etc
- onurcel 8mo agoI agree with you. In B2B SaaS you don't sell the software, you sell your expertise in a specific domain and the responsability you take for owning that expertise. The fact that the development costs are nearly zero will make them more valuable and more protifable
- mkoubaa 8mo agoDevelopment has always been a small fraction of B2B SaaS expenses after the first couple of years anyways
- baxtr 8mo agoFor big corporations at least prices of SaaS are rarely an issue. Issues are: we don’t have the time to introduce a new tool, what about our processes, we don’t have the right people.
- ActionHank 8mo agoAlso, it is my experience that exec and boards favour safe and well known B2B partners over in house. It's a more publicly defensible approach that gives them an out if things go wrong and shareholders get upset.