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This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with a

This is the same reasoning people use to say SaaS is dead, but it makes no sense. Rolling things yourself is often 10x more costly and not worth it, even with agents you need to pay 5-10 guys 150k-250k a year to build and train your own agent, why not pay fin 250k flat and not deal with any of it? Same goes with basically all other software that has nothing to do with your core product. I built an AI support agent in one week. It hooks into our knowledge base, app API, runs tests, and then finally sends a Yes|No|Other option to a real human to send back to the customer. It was surprisingly easy to build. The hardest part was the knowledge of how to help the customer, which Fin can't do for me anyway. I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. There is no model training needed. It's all context. Anyone who is training a Qwen model for their customer support is doing it wrong. Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there. The technical stuff is really easy to build.

spwa4 4mo ago
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. The value, of course, is that there is a website with a chatbox that some MBA can type in "never give any refunds anymore for any reason", and it just updates the AI support agent and sends an automated "I deserve a promotion and a raise" to their boss.
- aurareturn 4mo ago
  Yes. I agree. When I look at Fin's home page and marketing, I think to myself that this stuff can mostly just be text documentation given to an LLM. It's a tool built for MBAs but most of the work is done by a software engineer to give Fin that context in the first place. So all Fin is is a UI on top of the context engineering done by a software engineer who integrated with Fin. It's extremely easy to duplicate Fin's UI and get rid of the $250k fee.
  - spwa4 4mo ago
    Well, it's a few weeks of work, systems integration, and you'll need an SRE too if you're hoping to run it on any scale. But yes, I agree.
    - aurareturn 4mo ago
      You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data? It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules. They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.
      - spwa4 4mo ago
        They call it rules? Because of course one of the defining properties of LLMs is that they can decide to deviate, reinterpret, or ... rules. Which makes them more like guidelines, or so the meme goes.
        aurareturn 4mo ago
        And why would Fin's LLM solve hallucination/deviation over Claude/GPT? A rule is just a line of text to an LLM.
DoingSomeThings 4mo ago
"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.
- aurareturn 4mo ago
  The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.
  - DoingSomeThings 4mo ago
    Maybe you've done this yourself. I'm honestly jealous if solving customer support was as easy as your describe. In my case, I've spent the past 12 months running implementations at multiple companies. I've engaged directly with smart engineering teams to assist. It was not that easy. What you outlined might work for a simple ecom business. It probably does 95% of the job for a simple case where you're delivering information. But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data. That leads to the exact issue people here complain about... an LLM that doesn't actually answer the question, can't solve the problem, and is worse than talking to a human
    - aurareturn 4mo ago
whstl 4mo ago
Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive. Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage. Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?
rtpg 4mo ago
> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. Y'all really over indexing on the "AI"-ness of intercom. Intercom is a chat box and help pages. Those are nice to have and nice to not have to build yourself (you can build your own help pages... great, now you're managing content and have to have an admin to update the docs etc!) People here really forgetting the notion of "core competency".
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

spwa4 4mo ago

> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. The value, of course, is that there is a website with a chatbox that some MBA can type in "never give any refunds anymore for any reason", and it just updates the AI support agent and sends an automated "I deserve a promotion and a raise" to their boss.

aurareturn 4mo ago
Yes. I agree. When I look at Fin's home page and marketing, I think to myself that this stuff can mostly just be text documentation given to an LLM. It's a tool built for MBAs but most of the work is done by a software engineer to give Fin that context in the first place. So all Fin is is a UI on top of the context engineering done by a software engineer who integrated with Fin. It's extremely easy to duplicate Fin's UI and get rid of the $250k fee.
- spwa4 4mo ago
  Well, it's a few weeks of work, systems integration, and you'll need an SRE too if you're hoping to run it on any scale. But yes, I agree.
  - aurareturn 4mo ago
    You'll need an SRE for Fin too. How else can Fin get access to your customer's data? It takes the same amount of time to build a custom agent as an agent on Fin. All Fin does is provide a fancy UI for non-technical people to create rules. They can create the same rules in plain text. If they want a fancy UI like Fin to do it, just build one in a day.
    - spwa4 4mo ago
      They call it rules? Because of course one of the defining properties of LLMs is that they can decide to deviate, reinterpret, or ... rules. Which makes them more like guidelines, or so the meme goes.
      - aurareturn 4mo ago
        And why would Fin's LLM solve hallucination/deviation over Claude/GPT? A rule is just a line of text to an LLM.

DoingSomeThings 4mo ago

"Paying Fin $250k flat does nothing since it isn't going to actually know how to solve problems. The real challenge is the knowledge and context engineering and Fin doesn't help there" You misunderstand the model. Fin does not have flat fee. They charge exclusively for resolutions. That's the entire value prop. Correct that knowledge and context engineering are the key. Fin DOES help here. They have an entire backend suite to help you build out areas where Fin is failing. It shows you questions it couldn't resolve, looks at the answers your human team gave, and suggests updates to help articles to You're correct this could all be build by a skilled engineer, but that's not the point. It's built for non-techincal users to use and implement. A person who rose through the support ranks and shows some technical competency can learn the system without any software knowledge.

aurareturn 4mo ago
The bulk of the work is context engineering which is done outside of Fin. Once you do the context engineering, it's very easy to duplicate Fin's features. Seriously. Just try it. You don't need a fancy editor for "if this then do this". A simple text document is all you need. And if you do need a fancy editor, it's extremely easy to build it in 2026. Maybe 1-2 days. I'm not a SaaS believer anymore.
- DoingSomeThings 4mo ago
  Maybe you've done this yourself. I'm honestly jealous if solving customer support was as easy as your describe. In my case, I've spent the past 12 months running implementations at multiple companies. I've engaged directly with smart engineering teams to assist. It was not that easy. What you outlined might work for a simple ecom business. It probably does 95% of the job for a simple case where you're delivering information. But it will fail the second it needs to take action or deliver personalized information based on client's account data. That leads to the exact issue people here complain about... an LLM that doesn't actually answer the question, can't solve the problem, and is worse than talking to a human
  - aurareturn 4mo ago

whstl 4mo ago

Rolling something yourself was a waste of time when SaaS was cheap and competitive. Not they’re all getting incredibly expensive, even the last few startups I worked at were paying hundreds of thousands of euros for services that were total garbage. Do I really need a crappy 20k/yr app to help me with my 1:1s? Do I really need a 100k/yr clicks counter that requires two devs to keep running and still heavily miscounts the clicks? Do I need another crappy app to manage my translation JSON files?

rtpg 4mo ago

> I see absolutely zero value in something like Fin. Y'all really over indexing on the "AI"-ness of intercom. Intercom is a chat box and help pages. Those are nice to have and nice to not have to build yourself (you can build your own help pages... great, now you're managing content and have to have an admin to update the docs etc!) People here really forgetting the notion of "core competency".

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]