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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#331

Post by pier25 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #227

Reminds me of the story of when the Surgeon General (in the US) reported that smoking causes cancer. People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later. I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just lik…

> it's just going to take a lot longer than many think

I'd be very surprised if devs were fully replaced by AI in less than 10 years.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#332

Post by groundzeros2015 »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It'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…

> "just do the parts of it we actually use".

25 years here. You can absolutely do this. Most software is orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be.

The junior programmer you are talking about who wanted to rewrite it in a weekend tends to come back with a working program, not empty handed.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#333

Post by stavros »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #297
bee_rider wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they actually not understand that? They might just be fine with a system that makes them more useful. How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full…

> Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people. If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.

Agreed, our backlog is insane.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#334

Post by karmasimida »

I think people here need to accept that software is becoming electricity, you get charged when you use it and by how much. You don't pay for a box shaped electricity or purple color electricity, it is just electricity.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#335

Post by x0x0 »

mbesto wrote: post #136

1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore." 2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your . Nor or they grounded…

Yeah, this is just long-form linkedin slop. He's thought-leadering to get you to get his (no-doubt slop-written) guides and do leadgen for his forthcoming saas.

sigh.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#336

Post by puppymaster »

bandrami wrote: post #162

It'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…

There's that and then there are companies spending 100k on a software suite just to use that 2 features. So now one of their junior dev solves it and becomes a hero. The truth it always somewhere in the middle.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#337

Post by array_key_first »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #297
bee_rider wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they actually not understand that? They might just be fine with a system that makes them more useful. How do you calculate the time spent on an internal tool like this, actually? (I’ve never been in management). Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime, maybe some internal tool maintenance can be fit in there? I mean it obviously isn’t fully “free” but is also shouldn’t be “billed” at their full…

> Realistically your team inevitably will have some downtime What? My team wouldn't have any downtime even if we had 10x the amount of people. If you work at a company where you have times where you don't have work to do, you should polish your resume because it means the company will go under.

Doing work is easy, not doing work is hard. It's trivial for any engineer to find stuff to do. The trick is doing the right stuff. Most software is bad and clunky, most requirements are wrong, and most of your customers, at best, tolerate your product.

I think most software companies need to be doing less. Deleting code, refining, and making their product genuinely useful as opposed to "able to technically contort to client needs".

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#338

Post by _heimdall »

phil21 wrote: post #293
cj wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem. If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much…

100% agree. If I am using a cloud log provider I wouldn't expect them to solve my logging issue(s) as fast as I need, more importantly I have no real way to put more resources on that fix.

More importantly, with a third party service I'd be very surprised if both went down at the same time and it wasn't a further upstream issue like AWS. If its my own logging service and it went down during a prod outage, I likely didn't properly isolate my logging service in the first place.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#339

Post by cj »

phil21 wrote: post #293
cj wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you’re having a correlated outage like that, then it’s likely you fix the prod issue before the cloud engineers at some giant cloud company even respond to an internal escalation much less fixes an issue. More than likely your prod issue is causing the logging problem. If you mean you are experiencing two totally unrelated issues at the same time, then I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much…

> I don’t think that’s a reasonable thing to really assign much value to as it’s incredibly unlikely.

In my experience the systems/tools needed to debug production issues are often only used when they’re needed.

Which now means you need health and uptime monitoring on your log server since without that, it might break randomly and no one notices until you need it.

> The hypothetical problems people imagine for on-prem infrastructure get really strange to me

It really comes down to the people and whether you have the expertise on the team. And whether the team can realistically manage the system long term. It’s typically safer to spend more money for the managed service.

(It’s a safer decision, not necessarily better)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#340

Post by mkoubaa »

onurcel wrote: post #189
kriro wrote: post #78

I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…

I agree with you. In B2B SaaS you don't sell the software, you sell your expertise in a specific domain and the responsability you take for owning that expertise. The fact that the development costs are nearly zero will make them more valuable and more protifable

Development has always been a small fraction of B2B SaaS expenses after the first couple of years anyways
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