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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#401

Post by IhateAI »

hunterpayne wrote: post #389
sdf2erf wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a place on the internet where folks like yourself, who seemingly have a way to think economically congregate? I personally dont know of one, for which if I did, I wouldnt visit here anymore. So many takes on here are so lazy and simpleton that when you go a few levels deeper all the flaws get exposed.

Its called PolyMarket

Its funny you mention this, I was going to say that the only communities I've found online where +EV thinking is the norm is in professional gambling circles. However, those exist basically only in closed off discord and telegram chats, where we are actively manipulating polymarket/kalshi markets && comment sections :)

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#402

Post by kstrauser »

noduerme wrote: post #400
kstrauser wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTOH, I was hired by an enterprise that was many months into a giant backend rewrite. After wrapping my head around the many plans, I realized they were rewriting Django, badly. One weekend I prototyped the whole thing… in Django. It worked. It met the specs. It was a CRUD app with a REST API. I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do tha…

Take this idea and bring your own validation library and forms and UI components to the next job, and you've described what I do. And then you have real lock-in.

Ah, so you’re the one who made that same company’s marketing website!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#403

Post by normie3000 »

noduerme wrote: post #398
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…

My career occupies a weird middle ground where, for 20 years or so, I've catered to smaller businesses that need bespoke solutions (because the SaaS available doesn't conform well to their business logic), but don't have the scale or desire to build and maintain software in-house. Sometimes these are slapped together in a weekend, if that's all that's needed. But in most cases they still become ongoing improvement an…

This sounds great if you get on well with your clients. You must be an effective networker and at sales. How do you bill, and how do you price your services?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#404

Post by RobRivera »

noduerme wrote: post #398
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…

My career occupies a weird middle ground where, for 20 years or so, I've catered to smaller businesses that need bespoke solutions (because the SaaS available doesn't conform well to their business logic), but don't have the scale or desire to build and maintain software in-house. Sometimes these are slapped together in a weekend, if that's all that's needed. But in most cases they still become ongoing improvement an…

People sometimes fail to appreciate the value of KNOWING the system inside and out when it comes to diagnosis and troubleshooting.

Observability is great, dont get me wrong, but past 3 to 6 months of work on the same thing...I can almost beet the observability tools in timetoresolve.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#405

Post by hunterpayne »

cmiles8 wrote: post #49

“Killing” is a bit strong, but is there a world where folks just vibe code solutions that they would have bought previously? Absolutely and and I think that world is here now. I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher. (Insert rant from dev…

Counterpoint, all your customer's data just got stolen by teenagers in the 3rd world and is available for purchase on the dark web. Was it worth saving $5k a month?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#406

Post by willtemperley »

I think there may be other factors killing SaaS, particularly data sovereignty.

"According to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey from June 2025, 45% of all organizations and 56% of “digital natives” cited data sovereignty and potential cloud changes as their greatest concern for 2026."

https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-3...

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#407

Post by acessoproibido »

badc0ffee wrote: post #177
rvnx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mail server in a router is easy to host, the problem is: 1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries) and most of all: 2) "Trust"/"Spam score" It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted. If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my ema…

> "Trust"/"Spam score" See jwz's struggles with hosting his own email. (Not linking to his blog here with HN as the referrer...) With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.

I use a small local provider (posteo) and have 0 problems with spam.

So a 20 pound monkey can also throw around some weight. To be fair I only use it for personal stuff its probably different if you need enterprise scale l.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#408

Post by sevensor »

trhway wrote: post #373
sevensor wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools. LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very int…

One of the key questions here - will LLM coding decrease the proliferation of app-specific Excel files (by for example accelerating and simplifying Excel-to-webapp conversion) or would result in an opposite outcome by making feasible managing even orders of magnitude more of those disparate Excel files :)

I wouldn’t bet against cramming more and more business processes into Excel. The guy who was copying cells from one workbook to another yesterday, tomorrow can have a single mega-workbook with all the macros more or less deconflicted.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#409

Post by inheritedwisdom »

fluidcruft wrote: post #349
baxtr wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This vibe-coding-will-replace-SaaS insanity is the new crypto-will-replace-fiat-money insanity.

I don't think it will replace SaaS but I do think it can replace the need for a lot of the consultant work that goes around configuring and integrating the SaaS. It will be much easier to have a spec that defines how things need to be configured and the machines can implement it (using the SaaS as tools). Frankly this is the most annoying part. It's not that the B2B stuff can't do whatever, it's that it never gets im…

In my experience this isn’t the case. SaaS systems, at the least the ones that are embracing this sea change seem to recognize that connectivity is key. They are opening APIs and partnering like we’ve never seen. They lack the domain expertise and resources to plumb the last mile. Companies can finally customize and integrate there core SORs at a reasonable price point and if you hire the right people decent technology. It’s a golden era, I do wonder if you’re correct medium/long term but the lack of skill sets to build, deploy, and maintain these solutions is very real. Many can vibe code a great looking app, very few can support it day two even for just a few hundred users.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#410

Post by softwaredoug »

Sure its fun to (vibe) code some internal version for a SaaS, but maintain it month after month? Maintain SLAs, etc? That's not fun.

Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does the internal dev really want to deal with the care and feeding of the random shitty timesheet app they created?

Do they want to take on the work of integrating random backend systems that timesheet system needs to talk to? Do they want to get called at 3AM when it's down?

Even AI assisted, living year after year with production systems is hard.

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