[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.

[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.

[SunshineTheCat]

This is exactly right.

You know what's funny, less than a week ago I signed up for Basecamp.

Could I have asked Codex/Claude to whip me up a Basecamp clone with the exact features I want?

Of course. Do I want to deal with managing that codebase, even with AI? No.

The problem has been solved and the $15/mo. is well worth the time I will save not having to deal with managing that codebase and can instead focus my attention on things that bring in revenue.

[baxtr]

+ the domain expertise collected from multiple clients

From 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

[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.

[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).

[simonsarris]

This is essentially what Jensen Huang (Nvidia CEO) was predicting a few months ago. Incumbents in most software spaces will probably see a lot of short and medium term benefits from the new tooling as being trustworthy and truly understanding the problem space.

[fsloth]

I think brands that build trust will be the key to sustain income.

People want to outsource some things. Thats what markets are for.

The internet will become even more scammy and noisy.

Hence trusted vendors will be like beacons, and not drown.

[perrygeo]

The default has been pay $x/month for every service. I've seen startups that require a dozen service accounts just to run the software, and dozens more to get onboarded org wide. One service for feature flags. One service for logs. One service for traces. One service for error handling. Another service for ticket tracking, which is completely separate from your planning, design, and CI services. Jesus. What do people hope to accomplish here besides just defering blame?

Replacing SAAS isn't about building a replacement services 1:1. It's about figuring out what you actually needed in the first place! Often we only use a tiny fraction of what the full-blown SAAS offers. IOW it's about eliminating the service entirely and building something that fits your actual needs, rather than following what some VC thinks your needs are.

AI or not, the "build vs buy" pendulum is now swinging hard to build. And IMO that's a real opportunity to consolidate, trim some fat, and actually apply engineering practices rather than just blindly signing up for every SAAS that crosses your path.

[habinero]

This fundamentally misunderstands a couple of things.

DIY software is "free" like a free yacht is free. It initially looks appealing but there's a lot of expensive hidden costs and upkeep and pitfalls and problems.

For one, this is a bad assumption:

> building something that fits your actual needs

Unless your business is very small and not growing, this is a moving target. Your needs are going to change as you grow and different groups in the org are going to have different needs.

You really don't want to be dicking around creating software that already exists instead of doing the shit that actually makes you money. Spending a few hundo thousand on a bunch of software is nothing, you spend that on one engineer.

You buy a SaaS product because you have a problem and want to throw money at someone else to deal with it.

[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.

[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.

[jatora]

Its a combination. Context windows have slowly increased, but intelligence and reliability has been a nonstop trend

[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.

[jatora]

Not the same at all lol. One would require robotics to solve. This is an asinine comparison

[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.