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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

#261

Post by kkarpkkarp »

honestly, if you are bootstrapping anything, you don't need saas now for the start

SaaS are swiss-army knife tools and you don't need all of this.

do you want to have a contact form on your site? Don't but the whole WP plugin for forms, ask AI for tiny, well-aligned plugin which will display form fields and process the input.

Do you need to A/B test your landing page? Just ask for another plugin which will switch page versions and track impressions.

No need for Hubspot when you have google sheets + AI-made plugin for this.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#262

Post by [deleted] »

adventured wrote: post #246
indymike wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wil…

[deleted]

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#263

Post by rglover »

tovej wrote: post #241
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.

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

If I give something like Sonnet the docs for my JS framework, it can write code "in it" just fine. It makes the occasional mistake, but if I provide proper context and planning up front, it can knock out some fairly impressive stuff (e.g., helping me to wire up a shipping/logistics dashboard for a new ecom business).

That said, this requires me policing the chat (preferred) vs. letting an agent loose. I think the latter is just opening your wallet to model providers but shrug.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#264

Post by enraged_camel »

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…

>> 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

We built an AI-powered chat interface as an alternative to a fully featured search UI for a product database and it has been one of the most popular features of 2025.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#265

Post by latentsea »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #248
mikert89 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There's been an obvious step change on the coding front from 2 years ago, and it feels obvious to me there's going to be another. The difference now is the people working on systems to clone SaaS at scale are likely starting to put real effort, sustained effort into now that agents are good enough to accomplish subsets of it, can be improved much further with the right techniques and orchestration, and themselves will get better over the next two years along with all the improvements and build up of tooling. Right now feels like one of those "skate to where the puck is going to be" moments in time.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#266

Post by mjr00 »

sayamqazi wrote: post #137
mjr00 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, ensure security, monitor, be on-call, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company. Yeah it's a fundamental misunderstanding of economies of scale. If you build an in-house app that does X, you incur 100% of the maintenance costs. If you're subscribed to a SaaS pr…

"Wake me up when we see swaths of companies AI-coding internal Jira". This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it. I know this is not happening for the next few decades or so.

> This shouldnt be the goal. The goal should be to build an AI that can tell you what is done and what needs to be done i.e. replace jira with natural interactions. An AI that can "see" and "understand" your project. An AI that can see it, understand it, build it and modify it.

The difference is that an AI-coded internal Jira clone is something that could realistically happen today. Vague notions of AI "understanding" anything are not currently realistic and won't be for an indeterminate amount of time, which could mean next year, 30 years from now, or never. I don't consider that worth discussing.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#267

Post by mbesto »

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.…

> The bottleneck is still knowing what to build, not building.

My hot take - LLMs are exposing a whole bunch of developers to this reality.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#268

Post by blibble »

LPisGood wrote: post #116
blibble wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the license on my open source code is a contract, and they ignored that if they can get away with it (say by claiming it's "fair use"), they'll ignore corporate ones too

If I were to go out on a limb, those companies spend more on tech companies than you and they have larger legal teams than you. That is a carrot and a stick for AI companies to follow the contract.

no, it's not an incentive to follow the contract

it's an incentive to pretend as if you're following the contract, which is not the same thing

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#269

Post by martinald »

runako wrote: post #245

> 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 compa…

Author here. What I'm seeing in particular is CRM/ERP solutions at risk. I know of two people in my peer group who are actively trying to replace a 'niche' ERP/CRM (not salesforce) with a agent built alternative. These are both >$100k/yr contracts.

They've outgrown the current (industry specific) products, arguably a long time ago. The discussions started like this:

1) Started building custom dashboards on top of data exports of said product with various AI tooling. 2) This was extremely successful, as a non developer "business" person could specify, build and iterate on the exact analytics. Painful to work with a developer on this as you need to quickly iterate once you see the data and realise where your thinking was wrong. Non developers also really struggle to explain this in a way that makes sense from a developers PoV. 3) ERP system at play wanted a renewal price which was a big increase, and API deprecation. This would require a lot of existing (pre "AI") integrations to be rewrote/redone. 4) Now building an internal replacement. They would not have even considered this before AI Agents.

FWIW this tool is not super complex, but it is extremely expensive (for what it does). It already has a load of limitations which are being worked round with various levels of horrible hacks.

There are a _lot_ of these kind of SaaS products about, for each industry. You never really hear about them.

Btw I use claude code nearly every day for many hours. Opus 4.5 has been a huge leap forward, I am blown away with how it can do 10-30 minute sessions without going wrong (Sonnet definitely needed constant babysitting). And the models/agent harnesses are only getting better. Claude Code isn't even a year old yet!

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#270

Post by insane_dreamer »

> most SaaS products contain many features that many customers don't need or use. A lot of the complexity in SaaS product engineering is managing that - which evaporates overnight when you have only one customer (your organisation).

This is the key point. Sure, you don't have the chops to be able to replicate the SaaS product locally with Claude/Gemini, but you don't have to, because you're no trying to make a product that can handle N+1 workflows.

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