Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#1

Post by fifthace » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 4:37 PM UTC

"We have stories today of a lot of people replacing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of SaaS with Replit. I think the vertical SaaS is in trouble." https://x.com/plzaccelerate/status/1946389738803335645

Does the HN community have examples of this that doesn't come from someone selling AI tooling? I'm asking as someone who makes and sells a vertical SaaS, and we’ve seen no evidence of it yet. So far, we’ve been able to reduce accounting, legal and consultant spending significantly, but our horizontal SaaS spending is going up due to lots of cool AI subscriptions (Claude Code etc.)

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#2

Post by d00mB0t » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

Sounds like the CEO/Marketing team at Replit are on a roll. There's so much AI hype right now it's frightening.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#3

Post by throwaway34314 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:39 PM UTC

We replaced a resume parsing SaaS with AI. They have some additional features that might make it worth using for others but an LLM prompt gave us good enough results and was 10X+ cheaper. Had been spending thousands of dollars a year.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#4

Post by moomoo11 » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 6:41 PM UTC

I think a lot of CRMs can be replaced by AI.

Most of them are garbage, overly complex or clunky, and all you really need are workflows that map to your specific needs.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#5

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Sat, Jul 19, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#6

Post by F7F7F7 » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #5

Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.

I've seen it used in two ways to talk about software...

1.

- Horizontal = broad

- vertical = niche

2.

- horizontal = notion solving a specific problem and solving others via integration with other products

- vertical = a company like microsoft that solves a range of problems through directly integrated 1st party products.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#7

Post by fifthace » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 6:08 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #5

Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.

The way I read it:

Vertical: industry specific (functionality that can only be used in one or a few industries). The ultimate case of this would be a completely custom solution a bank uses to do x, with a custom integration to their databases etc.

Horizontal: Can be used by many industries as they all need it (accounting software, communication & marketing etc.) Office 365 or Slack are classic examples.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#8

Post by jharohit » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 10:14 AM UTC

We have been building tons of internal apps with AI - some just cool widgets vs serious vertical apps.

Cool useful widget - A simple multi city clock homepage which is totally offline https://x.com/jharohit/status/1945756661706330574

vs.

A full blown NDA tracker which uses uploaded signed NDAs to process using gemini 2.5flash, metadata stored in Firebase and then a lightweight table to list all (incl when some are expiring in next 6 months) and what are key items to keep an eye out for, key details (name, company, country, counterparty, etc). NextJS deployed app on standard VM on office server (no replit tho). Will open source this shortly.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#9

Post by jharohit » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

moomoo11 wrote: post #4

I think a lot of CRMs can be replaced by AI. Most of them are garbage, overly complex or clunky, and all you really need are workflows that map to your specific needs.

this. plus most CRMs have a huge attack vector for info leak.

Re: Which SaaS have you been able to replace with AI?

#10

Post by muzani » Sun, Jul 20, 2025, 10:53 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #5

Can someone explain horizontal vs. vertical SaaS? This is new to me and I can't figure out what this means... its all SaaS so why differentiate? Seems like just marketing buzzwords.

Vertical is deep, specialized. Horizontal is broad, workflows, teams.

MS teams is horizontal. Send files, real time chat, channels based around access. Integral with general tools like Office and thus you're paying for more.

Slack is more vertical. It plugs well into integrations, people can write their own alerts. Discord is for games and gaming communities.

Full vertical - I helped to sell one for Asian hospitals. Hospitals were building their own comm system because Slack didn't have the fine grained access for patient data. Also Asians took stickers seriously. You can't just give a doctor a thumbs up frog emoji on their message to acknowledge. It had to take significant message space.