>It’s actually worse than that. A centralised SaaS product has to architect for diversity - every customer’s feature permutations, every edge case, every conflicting workflow, all coexisting in a single multi-tenant system. That architectural complexity is enormous. A custom build for a single customer doesn’t carry any of it. One set of features, one workflow, one tenant. Orders of magnitude less complex to build, and orders of magnitude less complex to maintain and run in production.
SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour. Plus the architecture to cover scaling needs.
With some thing Claude churned, you're on your own.
> SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour.
I hear this argument constantly about SaaS. In my experience, it's hard to get support without paying through your ass, and the fixes are slow if they come at all. Also, based on statements from Salesforce and others, SaaS will also become some thing Claude churned out.
> The deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.
Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.
If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.
The software engineers of today are what craftsmen and artisans were at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. It will be interesting to see how similarly this revolution will play out.
In a major (pre-AI-IPO) hype bubble, we can't be sure of any "deeper thing" causing software valuations to fail.
Especially when the economy goes shock after shock unrelated to AI too (tarrifs, a bad economy, unpredictable White House tennants, fears of war).
Valuations are fickle and can reverse course just as well as continue it.
The "deeper thing" is mostly taking what the article says for granted, when it hasn't been happening in any real scale. No real movement of companies getting rid of their Salesforce or Microsoft suite or such just yet - a handful of cherry-picked examples that might have replaced some smaller SaaS with a custom thing with different degrees of success.
coldtea|12 days ago
SaaS also covers all kind of legal requirements (accessibility, auditing, security, payment handling, and so on), and has someone to support, blame, and come and fix it when things go sour. Plus the architecture to cover scaling needs.
With some thing Claude churned, you're on your own.
pu_pe|11 days ago
I hear this argument constantly about SaaS. In my experience, it's hard to get support without paying through your ass, and the fixes are slow if they come at all. Also, based on statements from Salesforce and others, SaaS will also become some thing Claude churned out.
kaiwren|12 days ago
cptMayhem|10 days ago
Was it ever an asset? I write software and I see my job as trying to write the least amount of software possible, because in reality, more lines of code means more time writing, reviewing, and maintaining. More bugs that may be possible, more work in general for features that people might never use. Software was never an asset, it's a liability. It's a means to an end. The real product is the service.
If a company has software engineers to take care of that, I can see them preferring an in-house solution. What I don't see are e.g. lawyers, accountants, or physicians, spending their time asking their LLM to solve a bug in their own platform instead of just hiring that service.
kaiwren|12 days ago
The deeper thing is this: the traditional economics of software - the idea that building software creates an asset - is breaking.
gehwartzen|12 days ago
coldtea|12 days ago
Especially when the economy goes shock after shock unrelated to AI too (tarrifs, a bad economy, unpredictable White House tennants, fears of war).
Valuations are fickle and can reverse course just as well as continue it.
The "deeper thing" is mostly taking what the article says for granted, when it hasn't been happening in any real scale. No real movement of companies getting rid of their Salesforce or Microsoft suite or such just yet - a handful of cherry-picked examples that might have replaced some smaller SaaS with a custom thing with different degrees of success.