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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Yea, I've replaced Windows with Ubuntu on my pc and have just ordered an M5 Macbook Air.
Sure both have their quirks, but it's just wild how much Windows goes out of its way to be annoying. From a billion startup notifications to basic UI stuff to copilot and the list goes on.
It's tough to imagine how different it must be for kids now than when I went to school.
I know there's a billion other reasons, but I've heard parents say they want their kid to have a phone so they can keep in touch if they need to.
When I was a kid, cell phones weren't a thing (at least for kids) so the once or twice a year I needed to call a parent I went down to the office and asked to use their phone.
Then I got to have whatever, usually embarrassing, conversation with my mom while everyone in the school office stared at me. Good times.
Same here, the API calls have always been heavier for me than the storage costs. It of course depends upon each use case, but this is overall a win for how I've been using it.
Even with the storage increase, still way more affordable than S3 or many of the other alternatives out there.
I was just thinking the same thing the other day. It feels like the tribal screeching matches continue to permeate more and more places that were originally a nice place to hang out and learn or have constructive conversations.
I've seen it more here too and have been using that "hide" button a lot more than I ever thought I would.
I was paying for gigabit with the local ISP and it slowed down and lost connection so frequently I bought a Starlink (the regular one, not the mini) as a "backup."
As per the usual, my internet went down and I switched to the backup Starlink. After working with it for about a week I cancelled my ISP.
Turned out around 350MBPS down was fine for everything I was doing (and it's way more reliable).
Kinda drifting off topic, but I'm so bitter over this
My girlfriend had been paying for 1Gb fiber for about 5 years at the insistence of the rep because "You stream 4k content and use your internet for work". $110/mo or something. Verizon comes by and sets her up with a modem and an "auto-route smart 2.4GHz/5GHz" router which slots you into a frequency based on...something. Who knows because it didn't work. It just put everything on 2.4GHz.
I noticed while at her house that the internet was painfully slow downloading large files and dug into it.
For those who don't know, 2.4GHz will typically top out around 100Mbps. Around the house you're looking at closer to 50Mbps. With 5Ghz it's much better, about 500Mbps typical, but verizons awful "smart" router just put everything on 2.4GHz.
So for years she had been paying for 1Gbps, Verizon happily taking her money, while she never saw over 100Mbps. It's also not like they tell you anywhere that the router they give you will only realistically offer 1/10th your Gb speed. Such a dumpster tier company. I can only imagine there are tens of thousands being conned by this scheme.
Anyway, I put in a new router and switched to the cheapest plan. The internet is now much faster.
I hate that it works so well these days. I have my antenna right out ground level between the house and trees. Absolute worst case scenario, and it's been rock solid in everything but the heaviest of rain storms for almost a year now. Still, the occasional slowdown or half-second outage really screws up Android's idiotic magic for switching between wifi and cell to the point that my pixel phone is basically useless at home. But that's more of a "google knows best" problem.
It took Apple realizing that putting fashion so far out ahead of function on Vision Pro was costing it usage to see the dual strap. The ergonomics of the first strap were dog shit, and everyone, certainly Apple, knew years before Vision Pro launched that a dual strap was the only way to make longer sessions viable. But a dual strap was also uglier, and Vision Pro already had acceptability problems.
Look at the marketing materials for Vision Pro using the single strap. Next, look at the marketing materials with the dual strap. Which one of those would sell better into an office context where at least half the population spends considerable time fixing their hair. Which one looks slightly futuristic and which looks like a CPAP headset.
"How it looks" led Apple to ship a deficient strap, one that made the device actually hurt to use. And how it looks is why Apple stuck with that garbage strap for 18 months despite knowing from extensive user research that the dual strap was superior ergonomically, and despite having already done the R&D for the dual strap.
It was only when Apple had mostly given up on Vision Pro, understanding that the user base wasn't going to hockey stick, that fashion was already a complete failure, that they began offering the sillier looking but infinitely more functional dual strap. After 18 months, all Apple had was its existing user base, selling only a few thousand devices a month, so it shifted from growth to sustaining and that's what the dual strap and M5 logic board swap was for, holding onto the few users it has until it could figure out how or if to proceed with the product line.
That's not the case with Apple's headphones. That strap could easily be a lot higher quality without being a lot less fashionable.
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.
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