[codinhood]

I wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch.

Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services."

Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?

[spiderfarmer]

I cloned a product today that does the 20% of a product my client needed. It took 8 hours and will save my client 2k a month in licensing fees. Plus, I can now add the features they were missing in the original product.

There's a lot of money to be made in small business automation right now.

[ergocoder]

Probably never. There are a couple reasons:

1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.

2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that.

Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything.

Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time.

I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to

[alwillis]

> 1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.

> 2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.

    |Segment                   |Median Enterprise Price                   |
    |--------------------------|------------------------------------------|
    |Mid-market                |~$175/user/month                          |
    |Enterprise (<100 seats)   |~$470/seat/month implied (~$47K ACV)      |
    |Enterprise (100-500 seats)|~$312–$1,560/seat/month range (~$156K ACV)|

Enterprise contracts almost always include a platform fee on top of per-seat costs (67% of contracts), plus professional services that add 12–18% of first-year revenue.

So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.

[mrbungie]

> So for a lot of companies, it's worth using AI to create a replacement.

I'll add the nuance that those might be big companies with slack capacity, or at least firms that already are at a point in their effort/performance curve where marginal effort injections in their core business are not worthy enough (a point that, without being big companies, would be actually weird). Even with AI and as processes become more efficient effort is at premium, and depending on your firm situation an man-hour used in your business might be a better use of effort and time that using it on non-core services.

[alwillis]

AI is predicted to continue eating SaaS: https://www.bain.com/insights/why-saas-stocks-have-dropped-a...

[codinhood]

Interesting, so you're saying Anthropic/Openai/etc will get a general solution that won't be hands off. The moat for other companies will be creating the specific, managed solution.

I can see that, assuming models don't make some giant leap forward.

[spiderfarmer]

Your vision on the market for this is skewed by the fact that you're probably overpaid.