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AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

martinalderson.com

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Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#241

Post by tovej »

mkagenius wrote: post #232

> If anything, I think we'll see (another) splintering in the market. Companies with strong internal technical ability vs those that don't. A tangent, I feel, again, unfortunately, the AI is going to divide society into people who can use the most powerful tools of AI vs those who will be only be using chatGPT at most (if at all). I don't know why I keep worrying about these things. Is it pointless?

I do feel this divide, but from what I've read, and ehat I've observed, it's more a divide between people who understand the limited use-cases where machine learning is useful, and people who believe it should be used wherever possible.

For software engineering, it is useless unless you're writing snippets that already exist in the LLMs corpus.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#242

Post by indymike »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #163
jeswin wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this hap…

Yes. This is also why trying to add an AI agent chat into one's product is a fool's errand - the whole point of having general-purpose conversational AI is to turn the product into just another feature . It's an ugly truth product owners never wanted to hear, and are now being forced to: nobody wants software products or services . No one really wants another Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io or another basic software tool…

> No one really wants another Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io

I keep hearing this and seeing people buying more Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io. I think this is more of a defensive sales tactic and cope for SaaS losing market share.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#243

Post by nlake906 »

William_BB wrote: post #221
adriand wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The president of a company I work with is a youngish guy who has no technical skills, but is resourceful. He wanted updated analytic dashboards, but there’s no dev capacity for that right now. So he decided he was going to try his hand at building his own dashboard using Lovable, which is one of these AI app making outfits. I sent him a copy of the dev database and a few markdown files with explanations regarding cer…

I'd argue it's not CEOs job to code his own dashboards... This sounds like a vibe coding side project. And I'm sorry, but whatever he builds will most likely become tech debt that has to be rewritten at some point.

Or to steel-man it, it could also end up as a prototype that forced the end user to deal with decision points, and can serve as a framework for a much more specific requirements discussion.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#244

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

I'll add another obvious one: No rule that the SaaS, with its obviously much deeper technical expertise, can itself then leverage these tools to achieve even greater velocity, thereby exacerbating the problem for "internal teams"

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#245

Post by runako »

> I'm starting to see is people really questioning renewal quotes from larger "enterprise" SaaS companies

This practice predates even SaaS.

I read this article expecting to see a specific SaaS that was at risk, and the most I saw was "dashboards." (Which: dashboards frequently aggregate data, while the ongoing work of collection/maintenance/etc. is done by more complex applications.)

The thesis seems to be that companies can use coding agents to build one-off internal versions of SaaS apps like e.g. Workday or Salesforce or Slack or Jira or MixPanel or HubSpot. Which, if one could make such a thing for free and maintain it for free, why not?

Fortunately/unfortunately depending on where you sit, magical thinking isn't going to get Claude Code to build Workday, regardless of the quality of your AGENTS.md. Sometimes I wonder if the people who write these takes have spent any real time using Claude Code. It's good, but please be realistic.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#246

Post by adventured »

indymike wrote: post #240
benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

> I believe that agents are a multiplier on existing velocity, not an equalizer. Development tooling improvements usually are a temporary advantage end up being table stakes after a bit of time. I'm more worried that as agentic tooling gets better it obsoletes a lot of SaaS tools where SaaS vendors count on users driving conventional point and click apps (web, mobile and otherwise). I'm encouraging the companies I'm…

What I'm seeing Ad infinitum on HN in every thread on agentic development: yeah but it really doesn't work perfectly today.

None of these people can apparently see beyond the tip of their nose. It doesn't matter if it takes a year, or three years, or five years, or ten years. Nothing can stop what's about to happen. If it takes ten years, so what, it's all going to get smashed and turned upside down. These agents will get a lot better over just the next three years. Ten years? Ha.

It's the personal interest bias that's tilting the time fog, it's desperation / wilful blindness. Millions of highly paid people with their livelihoods being disrupted rapidly, in full denial about what the world looks like just a few years out, so they shift the time thought markers to months or a year - which reveals just how fast this is all moving.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#247

Post by linsomniac »

matwood wrote: post #123
linsomniac wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We just had a $240/year renewal for teamretro.com come due, and while TeamRetro has a lot of components, we are only using the retro and ice breaker components. So I gave Claude Code a couple of prompts and I now have a couple static HTML pages that do the ice breaker (using local storage) and the retro (using a Google sheet as the storage backend, largely because it mimics our pre-teamretro process). It took me no m…

How is teamretro a product to begin with? I feel like these SaaS’s exploded like js libraries.

It is fine. We already had a retro process we were using, and teamretro didn't really enable us to change or improve our process so much as just continue doing our existing process. It is a solid product, but honestly we just used a google sheet prior to it and that worked fine as well.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#248

Post by Bridged7756 »

mikert89 wrote: post #203
benzible wrote: post #124

I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…

A year or two from now it will be trivial to copy your product

Yes friend. That's what people said 2 years ago. Next?

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#249

Post by dboreham »

Present day AI is a box that has these properties: a human has to create its inputs; a human has to verify its outputs; a human has to create the next input based on the last output. Extremely useful for sure, but this is not the kind of box you can use to scale a service delivered directly to end users who can't perform the activities labeled "human" in the sentence above.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#250

Post by vlugovsky »

I'm building a vibe-coding platform that helps with building internal apps and dashboards, and this is exactly what I have seen with some of our clients.

A couple of them mentioned that they plan to cancel subscriptions totaling more than $100k/year for the apps they will replace with that SaaS. According to them, they have many subscriptions they keep only because of one feature. Another issue is that their workflows become a real mess when they need to copy and paste data into multiple tabs. Custom-built internal tools seem like an obvious solution. Those who migrate to custom-built tools, however, will face the challenge of orchestrating their lifecycle and creating a consistent deployment workflow, but this is one of the challenges we are trying to solve at UI Bakery.

In my understanding, SaaS products that provide customers access to proprietary data are in a much better position than other SaaS platforms. HubSpot’s acquisition of Clearbit a couple of years ago now makes even more sense because it will help them retain some of their clients.

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