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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

#341

Post by alexeestec »

SaaS was always just a transitional phase between desktop software and... this. We built entire businesses around being the interface layer, but if AI can interact with APIs directly, that whole layer gets compressed.

The optimistic angle nobody's exploring: maybe 'eating SaaS' means we finally escape the subscription hellscape where every basic function costs $29/month. If an AI agent can stitch together free/cheap APIs instead of forcing you into Notion/Airtable/Whatever, that's not destruction—that's evolution.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#342

Post by TeMPOraL »

enraged_camel wrote: post #264
TeMPOraL wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but it would be even better if it was accessible by ChatGPT[0] and not some bespoke chat interface you created - because with ChatGPT, the AI has all the other tools and can actually use yours in intelligent ways as part of doing something for the user.

--

[0] - Or Claude, or Gemini.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#343

Post by eikenberry »

jwr wrote: post #135

I am the founder of a niche SaaS ( https://partsbox.com/ — software for managing electronic parts inventory and production). While I am somewhat worried about AI capabilities, I'm not losing too much sleep over it. The worry is that customers who do not realize the full depth of the problem will implement their own app using AI. But that happens today, too: people use spreadsheets to manage their electronic parts (pl…

> Coding is the last part, and the easiest one. The real value is in understanding the world (the processes involved) and modeling it in a way that cuts a good compromise between ease of use and complexity.

Coding and modeling are interleaved. Prototyping is basically thinking through the models you are considering. If you split the two, you'll end up with a bad model, bad software or both.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#344

Post by bob1029 »

hvb2 wrote: post #340
bob1029 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Domain expertise + tight feedback loop This is the answer to a happy B2B SaaS implementation. It doesn't matter what tools you use as long as this can be achieved. In the domain of banking front/back office LOB apps, if you aren't iterating with your customer at least once per business day, you are definitely falling behind your competition. I've got semi-retired bankers insisting that live edits in production need…

I might be missing something but live edits in production and banking? Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?

> Doesn't that violate all kinds of compliance controls?

Technically, only if it causes some kind of security, privacy, availability or accounting issue. The risk is high but it can be done.

Half of our customers do not have anything resembling a test environment. It is incredibly expensive to maintain a meaningful copy of production in this domain. Smaller local/regional banks don't bother at all.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#345

Post by ethbr1 »

agentultra wrote: post #278
ethbr1 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're underestimating (1) how bad most B2B is (from a bug and security vulnerability perspective) & (2) how little B2B companies' engineers understand about how their customers are using their products. The frequency of mind-bogglingly stupid 1+1=3 errors (where 1+1 is a specific well-known problem in a business domain and 3 is the known answer) cuts against your 'professional SaaS can do it better' argument…

I’m just imagining the sweat on the poor IT managers’ brow. They already lock down everything enterprise wide and hate low-code apps and services. But in this day and age, who knows. The cynical take is that it doesn’t matter and nobody cares. Have your remaining handful of employees generate the software they need from the magic box. If there’s a security breach and they expose customer data again… who cares?

That sweat doesn't lessen dealing with nightmare fly-by-night vendors for whatever business application a department wants.

Sometimes, the devil you know is preferable -- at least then you control the source.

Folks fail to realize the status quo is often the status quo because it's optimal for a historical set of conditions.

Previously... what would your average business user be able to do productively with an IDE? Weighed against security risks? And so the point that was established.

If suddenly that business user can add substantial amounts of value to the org, I'd be very surprised if that point doesn't shift.

It matters AND...

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#346

Post by ethbr1 »

sifar wrote: post #336
ethbr1 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take a crack. > what do LLMs disrupt? If your answer is "cost of developing code" (what TFA argues), please explain how previous waves of reducing cost of code (JVM, IDEs, post-Y2K Outsourcing) disrupted the ERP/b2b market. Oh wait, they didn't. The only real disruption in ERP in the last what 30 years, has been Cloud. "Cost of developing code" is a trivial and incomplete answer. Coding LLMs disrupt (or will, in…

>> 2) expertise to develop code This is wrong. Paradoxically, you need expertise to develop code with LLM.

For LOB CRUD apps? We blew past that capability point months ago.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#347

Post by MagicMoonlight »

You can already hire Indians to make your own HR system. People still choose SAAS, because the system already works.

You do not want to have to plan out a system with 800 unique requirements yourself. It takes a ridiculous amount of work, and you are then stuck maintaining it.

It’s never been about the difficulty of programming, it’s been about the pain of designing and maintaining.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#348

Post by UltraSane »

pseudosavant wrote: post #296
robofanatic wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "we'll just build it internally" or "we can just throw it into an LLM" all of the time. Is that a bluff used to negotiate the price?

If it is a credible bluff, does it work?

LLMs can write surprisingly decent code a few hundred lines at a time but they absolutely can't write coherent hundred thousand line or bigger programs.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#349

Post by nitwit005 »

btown wrote: post #304
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.…

It's a bit surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't created a product that's "you have an Excel file in one of our cloud storage systems, here's a way for you to vibe code and host a web app whose storage is backed entirely by that file, where access control is synced to that file's access, and real-time updates propagate in both directions as if someone were editing it in native Excel on another computer. And you can…

You can use something like Salesforce as an app platform if you want. It lets you create "Custom Objects", which are basically tables, write queries, and so on.

It's just that the hassle of dealing with that platform tends to be similar to the hassle of setting up an app yourself, and now you're paying a per-user license cost.

Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS

#350

Post by nitwit005 »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #328
LunaSea wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't this breakdown if you need to pull new changes from the original project?

No. Written against the documented APIs and extension points.

"in ways that the maintainer may or may not approve of" does not sound like using the documented extension points.
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