[monkeydust]

The demise of saas has been overplayed imho. When companies buy software they are essentially buying something that solves a problem and the insurance that comes with that. Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen.

There is also a strong community aspect to software, someone asks for an enhancement others can benefit etc.

I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

I do see one where they can much more quickly self-create within certain boundaries and this is where enterprises will differentiate in the near term.

[miki123211]

I think it's a move from feature-centric SaaS to data-centric SaaS.

You can say that a SaaS consists of two components, the features and the data on which those features operate. If the cost of feature development goes to 0, and development speed goes to infinity, you can no longer compete on features alone. The Constraint shifts; it's no longer what features you can deliver, it's whether you have access to enough data about the business to deliver those features.

Instead of traditional, siloed, rigid web applications, I think the pattern for the AI era will be an "enterprise OS", some kind of Salesforce / ERP-like platform where all the data about a business is kept, and where applications like Slack or Jira exist as plug-ins consuming the database. Such a workflow makes it trivial to do a one-off task using conversational AI agents, or even to vibe-code a workflow-specific app that does one thing well, one thing only, and exactly how this particular business needs it done at this particular time.

[ethbr1]

> "enterprise OS", some kind of Salesforce / ERP-like platform where all the data about a business is kept

I read this, turn it to "person", and see Google/Android (maybe Microsoft/Windows/Office to a lesser degree) shooting off if they design their data APIs to be gen AI usable. Which they mostly already are.

If individuals can vibe code personal apps easily because their personal/relevant data is already in one place, that's going to be a major tailwind.

Sadly, I think Apple is too institutionally cathedral (over bazaar) to keep up with them.

[alansaber]

Yes, data is the new playing field, but if a specialised tool can do more with less data it'll still win market share. We can generalise to say that won't be the case in XYZ years due to generative AI but i'm not buying it yet.

[0xbadcafebee]

Who said SaaS is dead?? The HN uber-brain? The people who thought MongoDB was God's gift to databases? Don't listen to think-pieces you find here, they're wrong by default. Normal people (and businesses) don't want to build and run software products, they want to pay someone else to do it for them.

[TimTheTinker]

Don't underestimate the power of LLMs to build targeted bespoke systems. I used to work on an internal QA team at a software company, and it quickly became the "internal web app" team after I built 2 web apps (to coordinate manual testing and handle the post-release fix approval process). I'd bet a lot of money that the team I was on is currently building a lot of new apps and features for internal use using Claude Opus or OpenAI Codex.

For companies that are willing to pay a few more developers, they can build some bespoke apps for internal use (if simple enough) to coordinate workflows.

Of course, highly complex, domain-specific software will never be dethroned. No one can build a Linux replacement with an LLM. Same for DaVinci Resolve, Apple Logic Pro, Pianoteq and ArcGIS. But glorified CRUD apps that handle basic workflows and integrations will likely be subject to losses on the low end, where a few devs and a Claude Code subscription can handle basic cases.

[snapcaster]

The stock market has said SaaS is dead

[samschooler]

I would say it's the market and sentiment around SAAS right now. See HubSpot, Atlassian, Salesforce, etc. tickers.

[coldlestat]

> I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

I agree on that point. But I think the industry will still take a huge hit. As SaaS may not be killed by any random individuals, but big corps.

-

We just moved from sharing skills about good practice for a few functions to skills about good architecture/design/marketing practices.

It's just a question of time before we get skills about "good features in a CRM". And there is a high chance, a LLM will generate them in a few minutes ^_^

We could already do them for a few software, like notepads and ticketing software.

IMO any fully virtualized business will become trivialized through global knowledge sharing.

-

I don't think META/MICROSOFT/OPENAI will close their eyes on the "Amazon Basics" strategy. IMO they will (soon?) provide high scale replacements for simple and expected softwares.

Right now it would require them a lot of defocus. But soon it will be just a new product, an agent away.

[intrasight]

>provide high scale replacements for simple and expected softwares

I like the "Amazon Basics" analogy.

Also consider that these enterprise platforms are both very expensive and very customizable. Consider SAP which is a huge proprietary mess - including the backing store. An enterprise that buys into SAP is also buying into spending $1M+ a year on consultants.

Open enterprise software will have at it's core open relational database schemas that can be run on the database engine of your choosing. The AI models will be very familiar with those schemas and with the presentation tiers, and will be building a bespoke business app - but not from scratch.

I think the enterprise software consultancies are going to be in trouble. New consultancies will soon emerge who will help move customers off of the legacy platforms.

[itissid]

There could be another model in the future, one where many more independent people might support self maintained software by non saas companies

e.g. If the supply of labor learning to build software increases and it becomes very close to what are now vocation training, then you can just hire a guy — like you would a consultant — who can quickly get spun up and make fixes. I would think one of the few things preventing this kind of socio economic set up are saas jobs that are siloed off by interview "walls" to most people from entering. Make it like a vocation, like plumbing or electrician, with lots of non saas companies supporting the market and suddenly it will be the death of saas.

The incentives for this future are closer than they were in 2022-23.

[sneak]

It won’t be the demise of general purpose SaaS like CRM, though it may be the rise of ridiculously full featured f/oss alternatives.

However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.

[mjr00]

> However, niche stuff like vertical-specific CRUD apps that used to be able to charge a heavy SaaS premium simply because they could develop CRUD apps and UI faster than their customers are toast.

You'd be surprised how many industries are just not that tech-savvy. Your average real estate company or accounting firm doesn't have the expertise to build even the simplest apps, and a keen employee vibe coding a CRUD app at a non-tech company is only 20% of the problem. Where are they hosting the CRUD app? How are they getting alerted when the CRUD app goes down, or when it starts spitting 500s? Who's handling database and OS upgrades for the server hosting the web app? These may sound like simple things to you and I, but to a company with zero expertise, the first time their database goes down and they (and ChatGPT) can't figure out why, they get spooked. If these companies wanted to avoid paying SaaS they'd be better off using Excel.

I started my career in consulting and it was filled with cases like this, even pre-AI, where a non-tech company built some kind of internal tool, it got too unwieldy because it was coded like shit by people with minimal development experience, and they ended up outsourcing hosting and maintenance because it was too difficult and they had no interest in building a software department.

[escargot4000]

I don't know if I agree with your line of thinking.

IME development speed is a very minor factor in the success of a vertical SaaS. Vertical niches exist because they are experts in something other than software, and understand it's worth paying for their problems to be solved. Typically, subscriptions of successful software businesses are priced based on outcome/value, not the cost of development.

[realty_geek]

I buy this argument

I for one have found myself happily spending hundreds of dollars trying to build things I struggled to do in the past. And I am happy to keep things open source because I know the code is no longer the moat.

As an example, I started this almost 10 years ago:

https://github.com/RealEstateWebTools/property_web_scraper

I the past 4 days I have added more functionality to it that I ever did in all the time before.

[mrbungie]

> full featured f/oss alternatives.

Assuming this comes from lower barriers of entry to software engineering skills at scale with LLMs, this is still begs the question: Who will pay for the tokens? One thing is giving away your free time for passion, other one is giving away money.

Maybe we'll see a future were people crowdsource projects supporting them directly via donations for tokens/LLM queries.

[m_ke]

it's not the end of software, there will be infinitely more of it

it's the end of 80-90% margins that the valley coasted on for the last 20 years. Salesforces of the world will not lose to an LLM, they will lose to thousands of tiny teams that outship them and beat them on cost

instead of 7 figure contracts you'll have customized tailored tools for enterprises, and on the other end you'll have a custom nearly free CRM for every persona

this also means that VCs will stop investing in it, unless it's a platform with network effects and heavy lock in

[ethbr1]

Alternative take, in light of upthread -- Salesforce, SAP, et al. are positioned to be the biggest beneficiaries of this.

Because their product is actually two things: (1) a UI/app & (2) a highly curated data model.

My imagined future... they just stop building (1), or invest much less in it, and focus on (2).

If they can build a compelling data foundation (ingest / processing / storage / exposing) + do much less work to still cover 80% of UI functionality + offload the remaining 20% of work onto customers, that looks defensible financially and strategically.

There's a ton of feature requests that are driven by a few customers. Aka the "You're using it wrong. We don't care, we want it to do X" cases

There are very few VP+'s out there that would take on strategic data integrity risk in exchange for anything, and as new SaaS code quality likely goes down (lets be honest) the imprimatur of a "known name" on the data side becomes more important.

[sublinear]

> unless it's a platform with network effects and heavy lock in

I'm always slightly amused when buzzwords are thrown around vaguely such as "network effect" and "lock in". Those are not entirely a matter of a better sales pitch or bandwagoning. They're about the actual product.

> they will lose to thousands of tiny teams that outship them and beat them on cost

They won't, but this is the actual reason. Nobody likes dealing with support or maintenance, and having to reach out to tiny teams is death by a million papercuts for the end user too. The established players such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc. have a mature product that justifies the 7-figure contract price, and there are always lower tiers of the same product for those who are that price sensitive.

[dana321]

"Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen."

All over the internet on forums are stories of software that haven't fixed x bug, missing features and bugs that have been in software for years.

[raincole]

Sure, and this is exactly why people buy software and vibe-coding can't replace it. Still don't get it? Windows, Photoshop, Figma, whatever popular software are full of issues. But people have worked around these issues and posted their workarounds and experiences online. The cost to live with these issues are amortized among the huge number of users.

When one got an issue with their in-house vibe-coded solution, where can they look for help? Nowhere, except hoping it can be fixed by throwing more token at it.

[monkeydust]

Perhaps those companies might start using llm to sort these out, typically it's the long tail that suffers in software...smaller enhancements, quality of life features that user would really like but can live without.

[brookst]

Sure, same way that restaurants have an obligation to serve quality food in clean conditions, but it’s easy to find counter-examples.

I don’t think anyone is saying that SaaS is a magic bullet that guarantees big-free software with great support in every case… just that it aligns incentives between buyer and seller better than the “if I can trick you into writing a big check once, I’m outta here” one-time-purchase model.

[wreath]

Right on.. we already have open source alternative to all the major SaaS out there and companies still opt for the SaaS option instead to avoid the headache of self-hosting and all the other stuff. The extra resources that AI affords you will be directed to building more features for your customers.

[intrasight]

> open source alternative to all the major SaaS

The question is "open source" vs "proprietary". Open source will become the majority of SaaS. But the industry needs to find the right business model. I think the model will look, to the enterprise clients, largely the same as today. There will still be usage costs (both per user and storage) and support costs. But there will not be "license costs". And there will be much less lock-in.

[democracy]

So true - very often companies don't even look at free alternatives but go after a paid one right away. Now imagine writing software ))) What a mental idea

[monkeydust]

Right, look at MS Office..Apache Openoffice and Libre are credible OSS alternatives but they have hardly caused MS serious headaches.

[gnz11]

TBF, open source alternatives don't have the legions of sales teams wining and dining VPs to get the contracts.

[jstummbillig]

> Part of that means they get to pick up the phone and complain if something doesn't work and someone on the other end has to listen.

Yeah, so that part is actually not that fun? If I can have a setup with a reasonable shot at just fixing problems instead of having to go through random-saaa-support that is like really neat.

[pmelendez]

>I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

I do see a world where every corporation would use agents-friendly platform to create their own accounts, crm, hr software. The insurance will come from the platforms vendor support.

[some-guy]

I’m at $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_SAAS and I agree. There is a mass psychosis going on around what these LLM tools (which I use daily) are capable of *at scale*. The amount of business processes and tasks these software suites can, and must perform at near 100% correctness every time is massive, across an insane number of domains, accounting for an insane number of laws, countries, languages, browser configurations, business requests, legal teams. The list goes on, and while you can bootstrap a front end that appears to do 80% of a large dinosaur competitor like ours, the reality is it can’t, and the context windows to get there are in the orders of magnitude larger than they are today.

The weird part is that people at our company also fail to see this. “This vibe coder is going to recreate 20+ years of code, use cases, business processes and integrations for thousands of companies across hundreds of domains!” is uttered every day and just simply isn’t true.

[scottyah]

It's certainly not true yet, but LLM abilities now vs two years ago leads really makes you think. It may not be easy to replicate all you do, but new entrants could easily just go after the highest margin parts of your business. Why try to tackle All the countries and browser configs when you can get 90% of the profitable ones, and just address that part of the market?

i.e. Apple does a ton of work to ensure I'm paying taxes and complying with laws in hundreds of places I'll probably never make a sale in. Sure, some high paying people might need all of that, but I'd be happy with just USA. I only utilize the other parts because it was a few clicks.

[cudgy]

Most companies only need a subset of the features that these mega-platforms offer, as they operate within single industry, targeting specific customers many times in a single country with a simpler legal landscape.

I have no idea for sure, but odds are 80% of the revenue of these current saas providers is generated from 20% of the features they offer. Lightweight newcomers can just focus on that 20% and ignore the other 80%.

[r0fl]

Curious if you’re opinion will change in 12 months as these models keep advancing

[barnabee]

VaaS - vibe coding as a service

[swexbe]

Does this matter if a 2 person startup can blow them away on price?

[hijodelsol]

A 2 person startup cannot provide a dedicated developer for your account, a personal contact for each of their thousand customers, is at high risk of being acquired/changing their business model/founders abandoning it, etc. For enterprise, long-term stability and personal contact matters more than price. A typical SaaS contract is 0.x% of yearly revenue of big corps and nobody wants to be the one person risking the business for such miniscule savings. Another often overlooked part: Employees are the biggest cost center, much larger than any contract. So retraining a single team of 10 employees can often be more expensive and more disruptive to the business than just sticking with a legacy provider and established processes.

[Qdulf]

You'd be surprised how little price factors into the equation for decisions like this. Anyone that tried to acquire customers as a fresh start-up knows that trust means a lot to established companies.

[horsawlarway]

This is my take as well. Everyone (correctly, in my opinion) assumes that customers won't bother to recreate a SaaS themselves with AI because it requires at least some skill, time, and knowledge.

But SaaS doesn't die because of all the customers creating one-off solutions themselves. It does the "desktop program" -> "mobile app" pricing transition.

It drops monumentally in price because now a very small (sub five) group can clone an experience and charge pennies on the dollar.

Why pay $15/month/user if some other reasonably stable company offers you $1/month/user?

[blueboo]

They’re not going to build their own, it’ll just be one of the many capabilities of the agent platform they use. A 2024 SaaS is just a playbook for next-gen AI.

You don’t buy a spelling correction program because it got built into Word. And now, the OS…

[friendzis]

> I just don't see a world where every corporation is building their own accounts, crm, hr software.

This is the world we live in. Majority of top level managements are now reevaluating each and every 3rd party tool they use and prospects of re-building that themselves. Don't forget that at those levels they are easily dealing with at least six figures per tool.

The tools are complex, clunky to use, complaints are often directed to the tools. We now the pain points, we know what the tools do, how hard would it be to instruct AIs to make better version addressing the deficiencies we face?

At some point some of them will realize the old truth that any business system is at least as complex as the business process it models. Those processes are indeed quite complex.

But you don't know what you don't know and extreme carefulness does not get you promoted to the top level management. So will indeed see attempts (typically unsuccessful) to rewrite common 3rd party tools left and right.

[democracy]

>> Majority of top level managements are now reevaluating each and every 3rd party tool they use and prospects of re-building that themselves.

What???? Noone I spoke too is even thinking about it. Unles your 3rd party tool is a notepad or a calculator for 100 grand annual licenese.