Wow, the tails on the lowercase letter 't' throughout that article are distracting.
AI is killing B2B SaaS
301–310 of 752 posts
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#302I think opensource is a good analogue here. For many SaaS products, you don't even need to vibecode anything - there is already a reasonable OSS alternative. Yet people still pay for the SaaS. They want support, maintainability, security, edemifcation, a throat to choke, regulation and domain expertise, etc.
I do think like this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690) is a good example of where a custom more domain specific solution makes a lot more sense that dropping in an off-the-shelf ERP. Still though, I think the bakery would prefer to buy the bakery-ERP than build it but vibecoding does reduce the barrier to entry so we might see more competition and share taking from incumbents by domain-specialized new entrants.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.
When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…
Fair, however at some point of a companies size/spending the complexity of integrating with a SaaS becomes as large as the one to run your own open source tool.
Beyond that, and Im aware this is very much application/company dependent, theres plenty of SaaS companies that offer horrendous or no support no matter what you pay. We used to use splunk for monitoring and logging. Paid a ton of money because we were handling financial data and needed tracibility and reliability. We constantly had to put out fires that were caused by their unreliable platform. It was not a good experience.
Ultimately, we jumped ship to Prometheus. We pay a fraction of the price and spent less time on it.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. In one weekend is a little much but I think its hard to deny that building will continue to expedite. What most developers don't think about is that the marketing, sales, customer service are all non-trivial parts of the business/product and all require legwork that is more than just sitting at an IDE. The nail in the coffi…
> We are certainly closer now to being able to prototype and go to market faster with a product. What are the higher-order effects when anyone can do this, and *aaS becomes a market for Lemons?
I think that just because anyone can do it, doesn't mean they will. Lots of people have really great ideas but very few actually commit to execution. Ultimately ROI will go down, deincentivizing the commercialization of that thing someone wanted to bang out in a weekend.
In the very long term, software will become a commodity, as you mentioned. Process and workflow may move into JIT delivery for the need at hand, in theory the data layer will be comprehensive and clean and the days of clicking around a bunch of stuff to fulfill process needs will move into a lower latency activity like...talking to your agent.
I saw a quote today by Brian Eno(1995) that said: "So the question becomes not whether you can do it or not, because any drudge can do it if they're prepared to sit in front of the computer for a few days; the question then is: of all the things you can now do, which do you choose to do?" and it resonated with me a lot.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS. This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
These examples are going to be lagging indicators of the underlying sentiment. Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this. Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
I have heard this from execs at public companies as well. I think a HUGE part of this appetite is that today no one has yet been subjected to doing business on a bunch of apps cobbled together by vibe coders.
They are just hearing the promise that AI will allow them to build custom software that perfectly melds to their needs in no time at all, and think it sounds great.
I suspect the early adopters who go this route are going to be in for a rude awakening that AI hasn’t actually solved a lot of hard problems in custom software development.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.
When you’re in the middle of a production down event and your whole team is diagnosing the issue, and your log server is unresponsive, who do you contact for support? No one, you pull an engineer off the production issue to debug the log server, because you need the log server to debug the production servers. See the problem? Edit: to be clear I’m no fan of Datadog and I wish self hosting were an option. I want this…
The old argument for being locked in to legacy software costing 6-8 figures a year was that you had no choice. Now you have a choice! Clearly that is better, and everyone should evaluate that choice on its merits, and the stock market sees that people are voting with their dollars. If your whole sales pitch is "good luck when it breaks!" you might want to reevaluate your business model.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#307Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.
There's a lot of it in the article. Very distracting, I just didn't know what to call it (I searched for 'tail' before posting my own comment).
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#308Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#309It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible…
This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.
There is still a narrative here. Lots of SaaS recurring revenue is built on value-add features that can be easily replaced.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employe…
I mean, for that example there's even less to do: you just put your employees directly on Nano Banana or one of the simple Nano Banana wrappers. If you need rich outputs, there are tools for that now too. Let me put it another way - would you want to be Adobe or Figma right now? And applied to the original point, would you feel comfortable being a SaaS company right now?
> you just put your employees directly on Nano Banana or one of the simple Nano Banana wrappers.
So you end up spending the money elsewhere? with exploratory design you can easily spend 10k a month on these models as a company of 1000, thus completely losing any monetary savings. Anyway you look at it, Saas worked because costs were spread out and low enough to not optimize it too much.