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What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#11

Post by mzubairtahir »

codingdave wrote: post #7

You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project. That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision. If anything,…

It's not about cloning and selling your own app. It's about using app that you are paying for, by cloning it using AI.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#12

Post by mzubairtahir »

soulchild37 wrote: post #5

Those aren't serious users anyway, business users who are focusing on their business don't have the time to clone and maintain their own software. People who claim to successfully clone and replace SaaS are never good customers anyway, they will either churn after free trial has ended, or post on reddit searching for free alternative

That's true that businesses don't want to waste their time by maintaining that software but it's also true that a bigger number of users will start cloning in the future especially fable, it's very good at this thing.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#13

Post by sph »

mzubairtahir wrote: post #11
codingdave wrote: post #7

You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project. That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision. If anything,…

It's not about cloning and selling your own app. It's about using app that you are paying for, by cloning it using AI.

An app that you now have to maintain. The point of spending $5 a month is not to have to deal with that hassle. It makes zero sense to do it to save money. SaaS customers really aren’t in the business of SaaS cloning.

The only people that might look into cloning an existing business are competitors, and by virtue of being competitors they already were a danger to the business.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#14

Post by sph »

i_have_an_idea wrote: post #9

You just discovered the SaaSpocalypse that began around January this year.

Is there an actual SaaSpocalypse, or just people saying it is going to happen? Because I haven’t seen it with my eyes, and it’s not like business owners are flooding to HN to complain how AI has killed their business.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#15

Post by fragmede »

sph wrote: post #14
i_have_an_idea wrote: post #9

You just discovered the SaaSpocalypse that began around January this year.

Is there an actual SaaSpocalypse, or just people saying it is going to happen? Because I haven’t seen it with my eyes, and it’s not like business owners are flooding to HN to complain how AI has killed their business.

What's going away is really shitty business models out of spite. I'd rather not build it myself, I'd rather just pay someone else to do it, but if the vendor is being a bunch of shitheads, I'll roll up my sleeves and replace them.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#16

Post by leros »

mzubairtahir wrote: post #11
codingdave wrote: post #7

You could clone easily before AI. When learning a language, "Build a twitter clone" is a tutorial project. That doesn't give you the business. It give you no users, no market, no branding. You don't have the operations set up to run at scale, nor the customer base to even need it. Not to mention the leadership to build out a vision. "Clone someone else" is actually a bit of a red flag in terms of vision. If anything,…

It's not about cloning and selling your own app. It's about using app that you are paying for, by cloning it using AI.

Companies are happy to pay for SaaS products that are being run by a team of people who are experts in that domain and are also responsible for anything that goes wrong. Cloning something in house, no matter how it's done, doesn't bring you the subject matter experts and it shifts the responsibility/blame internally.

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#17

Post by sdevonoes »

Even if cloning a saas is one click away (it isn’t now, but let’s imagine), you would still need to run it in production. If you care a bit about it, you probably want to keep it secure and up to date, and keep backups, and add monitoring/alerting. While AI can help with all of this, is still some work to be done by a (knowledgeable) human.

I doubt a large percentage of any user base is willing to do all of that

Re: What if users start cloning SaaS using AI

#20

Post by ativzzz »

I can totally see a world where a small team of PM + engineers can recreate internal business tools, you need to run the numbers to see if paying these people is significant cost savings relative to paying for the tool

The reality for most enterprise apps is that customers are using a small fraction of all available functionality and are paying for much more than the featureset they are using

So if a business can identify this featureset and give a team empowerment to build and maintain this featureset, it could work

Running a business is an optimization problem though - if you are spending resources on internal tooling, and people are more expensive than money, are you taking away from those resources being spent on things that drive revenue?

Plus, this falls apart when you start dealing with anything involving compliance. Part of paying for an app is you offload the risk of maintaining compliance to that app

Once you need to get legal/compliance/accounting involved, it's unlikely to be worth the cost anymore, so it depends on the data being processed by the SaaS

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