I think customers stay with SaaS not just because of the software, but because they trust someone else to handle the complexity.
The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
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Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#92I think this is true, but there's also another thing here: The software market is incredibly complex, and much of the "SaaS is dead because I can vibe-code custom software" voices don't understand why certain products are bought.
Let's take project/task management stuff. You can vibe-code a kanban board, task tracker with different statuses, and project folders quite easily.
For my personal use, I can probably build a "better" Jira. I could have an agreeable interface, a data model molded to the types of projects I work on and how I work on them, useful constraints that assuage my weaknesses (e.g. you can't have more than 3 active projects), and a persistent list of things I've shipped to combat imposter syndrome.
That solution would be far too opinionated to scale across even a small team, let alone an enterprise.
Companies buy Jira because it integrates with just about everything, because it's the de-facto standard so you don't need to teach people how to use it, and because you have all the SSO, workflows, approval policies, RBAC, etc. anyone could want.
SaaS vendors don't compete to offer the core features, but the genuinely hard stuff.
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#93"Accountability" is a value on paper, not in reality. The big companies that sell services are not really accountable, and in many cases will bankrupt their customers. See Revlon with SAP. See the Bavaria Colombian brewery, also with SAP. See the 4Hana case, again with SAP. SPAR group from South Africa. See Tesla surviving by cancelling their SAP deployment. It seems I have spotted a pattern here.
Is there any indication that migration to some other ERP system causes trouble less often?
There is a bunch of conventional wisdom about such migrations that some companies disregard and pay the price. I think #1 is don't customize willy-nilly, you will have to maintain those changes forever.
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we may have just entered the golden age How so?
Because it invites more competition. Previously, if there was one vendor but they sucked, you just had to put up with them and use them anyway. Now, if they suck that much, someone's going to come along and eat their lunch.
I think it could go either way because what I consider calcification of choices because of AI.
We've all seen people outsourcing their thinking to AI. "Hey Claude, I need bug tracking which product should I use?" Claude then recommends Jira because it's the defacto standard as of 2026. This leads to Jira getting even more popular, leading to subsequent training data keeping it as the defacto standard.
Same issue for development technologies. React/Typescript will never ever go away thanks to coding agents.
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#95The classic arc of internal tooling is generally:
* Person gets angry/frustrated/passionate about some third party tool they could build themselves.
* Person builds that tool. It's not perfect but does what company needs (for now)
* Person gets slaps on the back and congratulations for building such an awesome tool and saving the company loads of money
* Person leaves company
* Nobody else cares anymore and/or wants to bother with the inconvenience of keeping up with bugs and features
* After dealing with this for a period of time, someone says "Hey, why don't we just use third party tool?"
* Company re-subscribes to third party tool
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seen similar. They will be back when they realise the vibe coded SaaS run by two people in a trailer park isn’t what it looked like. A lot of the big SaaS stuff isn’t code or product. It’s support and hand holding.
Your last phrase is bang in on the money. Also the assurance it won't evaporate one day
Yeah we have actually have to prove to some enterprises that we have a certain level of staffing.
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#97[flagged]
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#98My guess is that SaaS will be around, but it's going to look really different. Say there's a company that sells you a subscription to an issue tracker. At first, it looks just like any other web-based issue tracker. But, although you won't realize it at first, it's hosted on a Linux VM with a development environment on it. Each customer's app gets built from source. Then, when you want something changed, you send a m…
Why send a message to support ? Expose the prompt to your customer if all they are doing is just bouncing it.
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#99I work for a SaaS and we recently had an interesting situation where we lost some smaller customers but are in the process of getting dramatically larger ones at the same time. As in, we lost some customers that were roughly 20-people companies, but gained some customers that are 100+-people companies. The ones we lost seem to have just built our solution in-house, presumably with AI helping. Conventional wisdom woul…
Smaller companies probably use a small subset of the features in the SaaS. This means one of two devs with an AI can implement the used subset fairly easily.
Bigger companies probably use more features and have more advanced requirements and the SaaS is integrated in different ways within different departments of the company. This means more developers are required, more interaction with different departments and thus less benefits of AI versus the traditional way of developing without AI (as the actual work is more in coordination, specification etc, than the actual coding bit).
Re: The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn't doomed
#100I think there's a secondary competitor to certain types of process-SaaS like Vanta for smaller orgs: a smart Fractional (CISO, in the compliance case) paired with good AI. The purchaser gets proper human judgement, and you can handle the record-keeping bit with an ai-enabled DB like notion.