> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?
I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.
The whole point of money is to pay for problems to go away.
No idea how good Zoho is, but if you can pay $X/month and never even think about the problem ever again, then that is compelling, and the value of that depends on the customer.
There isn't much to understand because I don't even think he understands or even thought about it more than 5 seconds. If he did think about more than 5 seconds and still typed this tweet, that's worse.
Will they lose a small customer or two to custom vibe coded solutions, yes. Will they be "competed away" due to vibe coding, definitely not.
You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.
Why would a small customer bother with building their own Zoho solution even? I mean, if an SMB did that, I'd call them morons.
Zoho has its flaws, but for small businesses, Zoho is a godsend. If an SMB doesn't want to pay for Zoho, I'd seriously ask them to recheck if they're making any money whatsoever.
Moreover Zoho is one of the few platforms out there that's really intuitive. Do this, do this and that, and you're good to go. Compared to setting up something like Zendesk or Freshdesk or Xero or QuickBooks , etc.
Let's say I'm a manufacturer of widgets, and instead of buying an off-the-shelf CRM I decide to have the resident IT whiz on the team vibe-code a custom solution for our needs. Now I'm a manufacturer of widgets AND a CRM SaaS shop, responsible for software maintenance/deployment/reliability/feature roadmap/bug remediation. I guess the idea is that AI agents will take care of all of those things too - to which I guess my perspective is "good luck! I hope that works out."
For Indian companies, a Zoho One yearly subscription is USD 13 a month if you use it for all your employees. That's USD 8000 a year if I have 50 employees, which I can straightaway claim as expenses and get a tax benefit out of it. And this includes CRM, Mail, chat, invoicing, accounting, marketing, advertising, etc. etc. So not just building the app, but also support, interoperatibility and offloading of all work which is not core of my business.
I doubt you'll get all this for $8K/year (India) or $22K (USA) even after you vibe-code once (not counting the ridiculous costs of developing with AI - you still need your engineers to do that even before you start running the token counter).
Garry somehow gave free publicity to Zoho with this post. Maybe that was his intention?
Well, then I claim that it will be the companies themselves that try to replace Zoho (or any other CRM for that matter) with a vibe-coded replacement, the ones going out of business. As someone said once: focus on what makes your beer taste better.
He said `would be first`; I 100% agree. If vibe coding was going to take over the world, then Zoho going out of business is a very good leading indicator. As soon as that happens, I will invest heavily; till then it is safe to ignore it.
I kinda hope so. When I started my career companies and orgs had in-house developers to make custom software for the org. The developers understood the business and were part of the culture. Then the labor market got tight, developers left for higher paying jobs, managers became afraid of going custom because they would lose the developers, so they starting buying overpriced SAAS products and contractors. If the job market is flush again with capable devs armed with AI, maybe we can go back to in-house developers again.
Technology alone rarely wins a market ... success usually comes from marketing, referrals, and network effects.
It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.
> Why pay $30/seat/month for over bundled SaaS when soon even nontech ops ppl can vibe-code a custom solution in a weekend?
Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.
Most probably all VCs will go out of business as the cost of creating software companies approaches zero. The need to create an army of software developers is no longer needed.
In such a hypothetical world, it would actually be much easier for us to fund companies simply because now the only thing we are funding is just sales, demand gen, and projected compute.
We provide funding so businesses that are the right fit can scale out the functions that they need. In some cases it's expanding engineering, in other cases it's expanding sales and demand gen, and in other cases is to subsidize a major purchase such as cloud credits or GPUs.
He will be right at some point. The question is when.
I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience.
The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia.
Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.
One doesn't even need to vibe code. Zoho type apps e.g. mail/smtp already exist there are ton's of free open source options. You can one-click deploy them on AWS/Azure already. To be clear I understand reducing friction is also a 'feature' that users would be willing to pay for.
Longer term AI platforms such as Replit could offer easily deployment of ready made app templates e.g. a CRM. However you still need to pay for them much the same as paying Zoho, prices could be lower. But you still need to pay for them and on a monthly basis too. Vibe coding platforms will still be a SaaS business.
Yeah, likewise. I didn't type this comment. I created my own Alexa-style Voice to text typist, using whisper and Rust. I've never typed a line of Rust in my life. making projects that would have taken months before. I'll do them in an evening, using my iPhone. This morning alone I've created a Auto Green Screen Program for my webcam. so I can put my own effects on it, like in Teams. - while I was at work doing my normal day. just dropping in now and again and giving it another prompt.
I use Claude Code on a daily basis, I've never got anything for "free" from it. So yeah, there is still a lot of coding involved, maybe just less typing.
This is impressive in the worst way! There is a stark difference between original YC management and the current one. I just cannot believe someone who has such a limited understanding of the industry & tech can be the CEO of YC. Following a leader like Paul Graham is practically impossible (and rest of the founding team was surely very talented) but this is just horrible. Not sure if it matters whether he's good or bad in the short term, but after 5 years of this kind of management they'll absolutely lose their advantage.
It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
Was it really just 4 years ago that NFTs were "the next big thing"?
The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.
By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC.
It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML).
All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company.
Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result.
yoavm|2 months ago
I don't get his suggestion. I'm paying Zoho for email hosting. What am I even supposed to vibe-code successfully for me to drop Zoho? There's no shortage of open-source IMAP/SMTP servers, in fact Zoho is probably using them too. Sure I can spin one myself, but I'm paying for Zoho for the *service*, not the software.
sd9|2 months ago
No idea how good Zoho is, but if you can pay $X/month and never even think about the problem ever again, then that is compelling, and the value of that depends on the customer.
iso1631|2 months ago
If zoho go bust I'm sure another company will replace them.
BloondAndDoom|2 months ago
giarc|2 months ago
You have to remember that no one gets fired for selecting an established software provider. Zoho is a 'safe' pick for SMBs because you know it will work compared to some custom CRM that Bill from accounting vibe coded in an afternoon.
fakedang|2 months ago
Zoho has its flaws, but for small businesses, Zoho is a godsend. If an SMB doesn't want to pay for Zoho, I'd seriously ask them to recheck if they're making any money whatsoever.
Moreover Zoho is one of the few platforms out there that's really intuitive. Do this, do this and that, and you're good to go. Compared to setting up something like Zendesk or Freshdesk or Xero or QuickBooks , etc.
kklisura|2 months ago
These statements are so out of touch with reality, I generally wonder where will YC be in 5-10 years.
andsoitis|2 months ago
Why do you need 3 platforms to vibe code a solution? Are each one of them not good enough?
mlboss|2 months ago
ne8il|2 months ago
andsoitis|2 months ago
Using same logic, why use Replit, EmergentLabs, or Taskade when you can vibe code your own vibe code platform?
mns|2 months ago
antiloper|2 months ago
sometimes_all|2 months ago
I doubt you'll get all this for $8K/year (India) or $22K (USA) even after you vibe-code once (not counting the ridiculous costs of developing with AI - you still need your engineers to do that even before you start running the token counter).
Garry somehow gave free publicity to Zoho with this post. Maybe that was his intention?
villosil|2 months ago
ZiiS|2 months ago
jacquesm|2 months ago
mrweasel|2 months ago
francisofascii|2 months ago
alberth|2 months ago
It’s the same reason why vibe coding a better version of Airbnb (even if it’s just a simple CRUD app) wouldn’t actually threaten Airbnb as a business. The product isn’t the moat; the ecosystem is.
ks2048|2 months ago
Seems ironic to post that - doesn't that same logic imply that most YC companies are worthless?
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
HardwareLust|2 months ago
almostdeadguy|2 months ago
tetrisgm|2 months ago
And I don’t think the friction in vibe coding is that different.
unknown|2 months ago
[deleted]
joshstrange|2 months ago
jonners00|2 months ago
jmathai|2 months ago
Feels very disingenuous. I'm a huge proponent of AI drastically increasing efficiency of creating software but we're a long ways away from nontech people replacing and supporting collaboration tools used by medium sized businesses.
zkmon|2 months ago
mlboss|2 months ago
alephnerd|2 months ago
In such a hypothetical world, it would actually be much easier for us to fund companies simply because now the only thing we are funding is just sales, demand gen, and projected compute.
We provide funding so businesses that are the right fit can scale out the functions that they need. In some cases it's expanding engineering, in other cases it's expanding sales and demand gen, and in other cases is to subsidize a major purchase such as cloud credits or GPUs.
hombre_fatal|2 months ago
I'm already vibe coding complex things like GUIs, my desktop environment (NixOS), and last week a Wayland layer shell client that would have taken me quite a lot of work if I had to do them myself from scratch from docs, and I have 20 years of software experience.
The things I spend time building and polishing today with my own time are just next year's vibe-coded minutia.
Some people are going to have a very hard time swallowing this pill, though.
encyclopedism|2 months ago
Longer term AI platforms such as Replit could offer easily deployment of ready made app templates e.g. a CRM. However you still need to pay for them much the same as paying Zoho, prices could be lower. But you still need to pay for them and on a monthly basis too. Vibe coding platforms will still be a SaaS business.
delaminator|2 months ago
bamboozled|2 months ago
iso1631|2 months ago
Surely AWS's overpriced lockin stuff will be "vide coded" away far faster than smaller companies
rsynnott|2 months ago
dzonga|2 months ago
as others have pointed out in other comments. the guys at a16z are guilty of this too.
da_grift_shift|2 months ago
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1506769562468958210
"If you own an NFT..." you are an innovator among innovators. - Garry Tan, 30 September 2021 [quote tweet]
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1443460589049704450
Web3 vs Earlier incarnations technology adoption curve [image tweet]
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1521530531568963584
"airdrops going mainstream could truly upend some % of the centralized ad-based economy of Web2" - Garry Tan, 25 Dec 2021
https://x.com/garrytan/status/1474826162408808448
BloondAndDoom|2 months ago
It's ironic how YC became the Google/Microsoft of its industry.
jmathai|2 months ago
The tweets don't age well in hindsight but sometimes there are technologies which feel like they might break through but never do. Having been bullish on the concept of NFTs doesn't make a strong argument for or against having good intuition of breakthrough innovation.
jm4|2 months ago
Vibe coding is more like the Visual Basic of this generation. It makes it much easier for less technical people to create software or for hackers to be much more productive, but there's still going to be a huge need for professional software development. It's not like everybody is going to become a vibe coder and there won't be a need for SaaS or low code solutions. I think tech people overestimate the capability and willingness for the average Joe to vibe code or engage with technology beyond the minimum required.
nextaccountic|2 months ago
music4airports|2 months ago
Hmmmm... https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/crypto-web3
Looks like the entire thread was bumped down from 17th place to 130th.
https://hnrankings.info/46120728/
>We moderate less, not more, when a story involves YC or a YC startup. This is pretty much the #1 rule of HN moderation. I've posted about it many times over 10 years: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41732846)
alephnerd|2 months ago
1. Advertise our thesis by building a narrative
2. Evangelize our portfolio
By posting a narrative (that most likely went through some form of Strategic Comms team) comparing Zoho against a vibe coded product while also showcasing some of YC's star vibe-coded products, Garry is able to both craft a narrative that helps support YC's portfolio as well as bring a couple of people to start thinking about Vibecoding. It also acts as an indirect attack on G-Suite without calling out a massive organization like Alphabet by name, which YC needs to coexist with because a large portion of YC portfolio companies will either be acquired by Alphabet or will take or have taken some amount of funding from Alphabet and Alphabet related personal, and Alphabet personal are LPs in YC.
It doesn't matter if the take is right or wrong - it's started a discussion, and maybe one or two Zoho customers have now heard of a couple YC products to consider (outside of the HN bubble, very few people know about vibe coding or AI/ML).
All businesses do this, and knowing Zoho, they will probably leverage this as well as a way to market data sovereigninty and "make in India" by raising the specter of the big bad American capitalist trying to undermine a bootstrapped Indian company.
Anyhow, Zoho has built it's own foundation model [0] and offers an Agents marketplace for domain-specific agents [1]. I'm not sure if can compete head on against a LLaMa or DeepSeek on from sheer performance perspective, but it's good enough (something which a lot of engineers forget is more important than being perfect) to build a "data sovereignty" and "tech nationalism" story which they will absolutely run with as a result.
[0] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/llm.html
[1] - https://www.zoho.com/zia/agents/
presentation|2 months ago
[deleted]
bgwalter|2 months ago
Of course he endorses slop coding (Pichai's endorsement is criticized by the Zoho founder for those who do not click through to X).
Zoho will now be a very interesting company for the vast majority of people who hate "AI". I'll have to check it out.