Discussion

kemiller: 100%. Saas isn’t going away, but the economics are changing drastically and that’s bad for one-size-fits-all tools, and excellent for niche solutions. But it’s still saas, just more specific.

christkv: Neither am I. It feels like the dotcom in the sense that people will be spitting out new apps all overt the place. Down the line they will have problems maintaining them (and will say it's not core to their business) and they will revert to SaaS. However i expect the SaaS apps to have super low margins compared to today. Instead of 20-30% it will be 5-7% and the companies will be a shadow of themselves.

Ancalagon: I don’t disagree if models stay as capable as they are today. But devils advocate: the point of the saaspocalypse isn’t just that anyone will be able to make their own software, it’s also that the AI will be good enough and interconnected enough to maintain it.The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting files and monitors said application. It’s where Jo-shmo at the law firm can tell the model “give me a new billing system”, and the AI does everything correctly and better than a team of software engineers, in a matter of minutes or hours. And that AI maintains it for them, better than the engineers would have

paulhebert: I really struggle to imagine that working. What does “a new billing system” even mean? How is it better than the old system?

gos9: Incentive check! The author seems to have a vested interest in people not making their own software. Curious

skywhopper: Everything you describe is fantasy, though. It’s not real. It’s not possible to be real. “Give me a new billing system”?? No way is that going to produce a good result for the company or their clients. But the second that Joe Schmo has to start laying out all the ever-evolving requirements for his custom billing system, he will run back to traditional SaaS providers.At best, if AI is supergenius enough to just intuit everything Joe needs, then the cost of running the AI to constantly maintain a billing system will far exceed the cost of just paying someone for their existing billing system SaaS.

Ancalagon: I'm not saying its logical - I think this is what investors believe however.

SunshineTheCat: The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS.The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble."I actually think the opposite is true.With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platforms "built" by people who haven't the slightest clue how they work.One of many examples: https://dig.watch/updates/women-only-dating-app-tea-suffers-...This I imagine will, over time, erode trust in most apps/SaaS products. With that erosion of trust will come skepticism and with that, will come trust in the "old faithful" of SaaS products/companies. Basecamp is a good example of this.I could be wrong on this one, but it seems to me those that have built credibility for privacy/security/competence will become more valuable in the AI age, not less.

jatora: You're most certainly wrong on this one. Superior models give superior products and security over time. Until every 3-6 months stops bringing a large improvement in coding capability and scaffolding, there's no reason to assume we are nearing a hard limit.You also have to factor in that bespoke software is... bespoke. ie. much more suited to your org's use-cases than the primary solution is. Way less bloat. Way less vulnerability when you don't need an enterprise SaaS solution and instead can host on your private networks.And as far as security considerations: Imagine you had a separate Opus 4.6 agent tasked with managing and monitoring and updating devoted to a specific slice of vulnerabilities. Of course this is highly inefficient, but it would take care of the vast majority of vulnerabilities that even enterprise SaaS have. This is simply a scaffolding issue at this point, not model ability. Scaffolding issues like this will continue to dominoe.

harrall: This is like saying I know how to do plumbing so now I’m going to do all my own plumbing.Yet I will still pay for a plumber. I wonder why.

BloondAndDoom: It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS.It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price.In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

surgical_fire: > It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price.Is this already happening?Shouldn't it be?> In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.That much is true.

operatingthetan: >Until every 3-6 months stops bringing a large improvement in coding capability and scaffolding, there's no reason to assume we are nearing a hard limit.How much of that is better models, and how much is it AI companies throwing more resources at each one? E.g. larger context windows and higher token/s correlate with the better models.

fnoef: Competing on price was never a good strategy. Moreover, price segmentation is still a thing. You can buy Chinese Rolex knockoffs for $7, but people still buy $10k Rolex.

senko: With all due respect to what Jason Fried &co have achieved, this is wrong.Bespoke sofware does exist. And yes, consultants small and large have built, deployed, and charged through the roof for bespoke software. And often it sucks. Here's why it sucks: because clients can't coherently describe what they need, don't have a budget, consultancies don't care and - critically - the person writing the spec (and controling the budget) isn't the same person that will use it. (here you also have "A Tragedy of EdTech" in one sentence, but that's a different post)But there's another kind of bespoke software, which, for a lack of a better name, I'll unimaginatively call "internal tool". This is what VB6/Access/VBA/HyperCard enabled back in the day, what Retool tried to own recently, and what many Excel spreadsheets are secretly doing.This is duct-taped-code-pasta that barely holds but does exactly what the business needs, and nothing more. I've seen and heard of many cases already of non-techies doing exactly that. It's not scalable, it's not maintainable, it doesn't follow best practices, it doesn't have tests or docs, but it doesn't matter, because it works and solves a biz problem.The reason it works is that the person can iteratively narrow down to what they need, feedback is instant, iteration is minutes not days or weeks and is super cheap (compared to external developers).No sane freelancer or agency would ship something like it - for many reasons: as a software engineer you want to ship quality product and charge appropriate amount of money. Many times, that's the right thing for the customers.Often, it's overkill, and these types of smaller "quick win" projects never get started in the first place. And there's loads of potential projects like these!So yeah, nobody will vibe-code a payroll system for 100+ person company, nor should they. But people absolutely will, and already do, whip up something that solves their niche problem. Now maybe they'll use AI instead of Excel.

pilliq: True. The reason why this works is because someone owns it and takes responsibility of it, usually for reasons other than making money.

layer8: Businesses don’t want to use dozens of hyper-specific tools from dozens of vendors, if they instead can use a single vendor that can already do 80% of it and can vibe-code them the remaining 20%. I don’t see how this favors niche vendors.

somewhereoutth: However:Excel is 'free-at-point-of-use', i.e. once you've paid for it, to use it doesn't cost anymore. But LLMs do cost per use (unless we all go to local models). Either this cost is billed directly, or some sort of bundling occurs with 'fair use' limits.Excel is deterministic, yes scary spaghetti-fied spreadsheets are routinely constructed, but, for example, sorting a result column somewhere can be done with a bit of poking in the right place. LLMs have a tendency to dangerously change many things if the prompting is a bit wrong (and even if it is a bit right).

afro88: I vibe coded a saas and it went nowhere because it wasn't a good enough idea to begin with. I consulted with multiple varied models along the way for competitive analysis, pricing structure etc.AI doesn't solve for ideas and product market fit. But it did allow me to fail pretty fast before I sunk too much time into it. But also, I should have spoken to potential users earlier rather than vibe coding.

wxw: Strongly agree. Personal software is also personal responsibility. It’s fun to dream up features, much less fun to be responsible for their implementation and maintenance.

deadbabe: Why wouldn’t just make some AI generated user personas to talk to? Whatever their opinion is, it’s already been captured and is in the training data. You don’t need to talk to users.

mekoka: Do some people really believe that SaaS margins are dropping because the public at large has discovered that to save 20$/month on some app they can instead vibe code their own and use that instead?My current guess about the future is that the age of SaaS is coming stronger than ever. I expect many vibe coders to come up with half-assed prototypes that will be copiously replicated and improved by more qualified devs aided by LLMs. In a similar way, I also expect smaller qualified teams (3 to 5) to leverage LLMs to become more relevant competitors of medium to large SaaS players. By 2029, we'll have more, but smaller SaaS companies.

torlok: This is basically why I buy the tech dip. When you pay for software, you pay for infrastructure, expertise, QA, consumer relations, having staff on call, etc. It was always possible to replace enterprise software by 2 guys coding a product in 6 months, but you still need everything around the code before serious clients will want to work with you, and at that point you're a regular software company. All these vibe coded products are one untested push away from getting dropped.

baxtr: + the domain expertise collected from multiple clientsFrom a market perspective bundling this into SaaS players is more efficient.But: AI might enable niche applications which were to expensive to capture thus far

wewtyflakes: That's for signaling purposes, not for functional purposes. Who is buying SaaS for signaling purposes over function?

user34283: I also suspect AI is going to make software more secure rather than less.Even today it can probably find a lot of issues automatically. With basic knowledge of what to look for, it certainly helps in understanding data flow too.

fnoef: People who need support, and compliance? Things that AI generated slop can not provide

wewtyflakes: I think the AI would be exceptionally good at support, especially for a codebase that it owns, but you are right about compliance.

ozim: SaaS companies/devs are in trouble - but for slightly different reason. That was the case already for something like 10 years.Earlier if you had developers and no domain knowledge you were able to land a contract building application for a company and maybe spin it off to get more customers in that niche.If you got lucky and you landed law firm and made case management for them you probably had nice little niche.But as it turns out lawyers can also use JIRA, Trello, Basecamp or whatever and they really don't need Facebook for lawyers so those gigs dried up.Main point is, software development alone is not going to bring as much money as it did earlier. You will have to have backing of domain experts to get the business going to offer something special in your SaaS. Like possibility to actually have call with those domain experts or their oversight on whatever it is you are doing but you not having budget or enough work to hire domain expert full time.

gwbas1c: > Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all.Which makes me think there's a lot more room for "virtual people." Imagine a very smart AI bot that could hold multiple conversations at once and remember a lot of things.> So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design.What if there was a bot that was just smart enough to figure those things out, without needing traditional "software"?To me, that's more what AI is, instead of adding chatbots to everything, and vibecoding everything.

arbitrary_name: that's a good way to frame it, but it boils down to: what is it that these entities or individuals do that is valuable and how do you replicate parts or the whole of it.which is essentially the direction that were heading in: we're sequentially and iteratively building improvements.what the logistics company did pre computers and even pre trucks was not all that different in many aspects.the future will be via evolution not revolution.

nightski: Margins wouldn't drop because every consumer is going to vibe code their own apps. It's going to bring down the barrier for competition creating natural price pressure in the market. That is of course if all other factors end up equal such as quality, security, performance, etc...This of course will be software in general imho. It's not that the profession will disappear overnight. There is going to be this tight squeeze until all the margin/excess salaries/etc.. is gone. There is also going to be immense pressure to produce as much as possible and productivity expectations are going to go way up (even if it is unjustified).Basically, the good days are over. It's going to be a miserable profession.

senko: > The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS.I agree with you that is incorrect.With AI, not everyone needs a SaaS.They can make a bespoke tool for themselves with 5% of the SaaS features they actually need. If it's only used by authorized, internal, users and never exposed to the outside, many of the risks you mention disappear.That's not to say everyone will vibe-code their Slack replacement, but a bar for relying on an external SaaS vendor will go up (and I think that's a good thing).