AI, as do most things, help the big players get bigger. If someone is automating small parts of the b2b layer they get dropped, but it’s harder to drop an automation that companies are used to. I don’t see how AI is changing that, companies spent a lot of time and money to set up the automation because it’s needed and because they can write a potential replacement cheaply doesn’t mean they are going to rip away something that works and is reliable.
AI is killing B2B SaaS
351–360 of 752 posts
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#352It'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…
If the management is the one actually paying for the software from their own pocket (founder), the tables turn. There are millions of SME owners who are forced to pay for B2B software just out of necessity and not having resources to build it in-house.
AI could change that for good.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#353Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.
I stopped reading the article because of it.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#354Lot of places that I see AI disrupting - I'm not buying that SaaS is going to be a significant one. Reading through the article: > They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 Couple things we needed to understand here: - How large is the client company - Is that $30,000/month or day or hour.... If it's a technology company of > 1000 employees - then $30,000 month doesn't even get Finance's attention. And there is nex…
Yeh but in a company of 100 employees for software of 30k a year, it's more than worth it to take your standard 50k (GBP) dev and have them replaced it. It's a one time cost, and the support time will certainly be less than 50% of their time every year so it saves money.
There are many companies that operate like this all over the world. Outside of the hyper-growth tech VC world cutting costs is a very real target and given how cheap Devs are outside of America it's almost always worth it.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
The example I made about inventory wasn't random. One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few…
That situation makes sense but then i have to ask why hasn't it been done already? Software developers are not rare and if the use case is so isolated and discreet then surely it would have been tried by now. Even without genAI, CRUD, RDBMS record management, SSO, row level security... none of those things are new or out of reach until now. I think what you'll find is when you sit down with the users and start asking…
People do do it, but unless you work for a company you won't hear about their internal tools or products since they aren't selling them.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's shocking to me how prevalent this "who needs Salesforce when everyone can just vibe code their own CRM from scratch in a day" narrative has become in the business press. Like, what???
That's not like "Who need Photoshop everyone can just vibe code their own photoshop" They could just download GIMP or find cheaper alternative, that was always an option
No, the equivalent question that people are seriously asking is "Who needs Photoshop [or graphic designers] when everyone can just vibe paint their graphics with AI?"
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#357Reminds 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…
And where are they now (cigarette companies)?
Altria has 72.2% gross margins. 45% net
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#358It'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…
The problem is right now management is not only insisting on their team vibe-coding bespoke replacements, they’re avoiding paying for other SaaS because they can vibe-code their own replacements, often themselves, and they’ve lost sight of that they probably don’t want to be responsible for it.
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry but the amount of companies that need something like DataDog is quite small compared to their 30,000+ customer count. Maybe 5,000 companies on Earth truly need something like DataDog, 80% of their customers would be perfectly fine with a self hosted instance of grafana. Using an open source self hosted solution should be the industry standard, encouraged position, by default. Our industry does not gain over…
> Why are we acting like it's hard to set up? Because the current generation of “full stack” engineers are great at spinning up react apps, but struggle with infrastructure and systems management. It’s really not any more complicated than that. On a typical 8 person engineering team, maybe 1 or 2 people will know how to deploy anything to the cloud if you’re lucky. The expertise just isn’t there at most companies.
I guess we really are living through the leetcode generation! D:
Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS
#360A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, etc. Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to mig…
Regarding your last comment, majority of the people here are costal with FAT paychecks slinging code for VCs. It’s a totally different universe than running a Saas. That said, still a valuable forum.