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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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521–530 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#521

With a new agentic-lashup tearing across the internet every week, pointing the way to "gradient descent" software development, any purchasing manager worth their salt is going to ask some serious questions about their enormous SaaS bill before committing to another expensive long term contract. It follows that valuations must decline. Even if only because risks to moats have increased, but also because it makes sense…

Preposterous. Have you ever worked for a company as a programmer or for that matter as a manager? They don't just replace products ad hoc. There's an enormous amount of due diligence that goes into any new software product - making sure it fits the company, that it's secure, that it works properly... I recently worked at a small startup who spent on sales force @ $100,000 a year. I said you know what we could do this ourselves and you know what they said as every company I've ever said that to says? "We don't want to support it. We need to cover our ass. Everybody knows how to use this"

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#522
post #491

Lots of companies buy saas, and then spend years customizing and effectively building what they thought they bought. And for big companies, it is costly - a few tens of millions for saas licenses, and maybe around 50-100m for system integrators leaching on the enterprise, and doing the integrations and customizations, usually dancing around the data model, api surface limitations of each of the saas tools they want t…

That sounds great. What SaaS are you replacing?

I'd rather not name names - but one of the major, popular ones.

We contracted a lot of usage, and are using it literally like a S3 bucket with a malware scanner attached to it, and ignoring the dozens and dozens of document management capabilities it has - that we don't need. (Because really, we only ever needed a S3 bucket with a virus scanner...). This alone will allow us not to renew that contract, and save, maybe, around 2M per year.

Sure, we will have to have our own API that will require support and what not, but... we already HAD to have our own API that requires support and what not, since we have a bunch of legacy document management platforms running in various countries, and we anyway have to operate an abstraction and a router.

I am sure ours might not be the most typical case, but there will be savings, and since the economy is what it is, my bosses are telling me to go for every saving I can find, and thats one of them.

(I'd not try to re-write an ERP system, for instance, or a CRM. But a lot of smaller things where we pay a substantial premium? Sure - we will try.).

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#523
> how they’re potentially losing an $X00,000 account just because the customer can’t use a specific failure reporting workflow in the SaaS. They’re now working with me to build what the customer needs and retain them.

You mean the poor SaaS company actually now has to implement features needed by customers??

Jesus wept.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Wait until they realize one of their vibe coded apps validates everything client side and their entire DB is open to the world.

Like that never happened with non-vibecoded stuff.

There's a difference between someone breaking into your house to steal your valuables, and you getting robbed after leaving your valuables on your lawn with a sign saying "Look At My Valuables"

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. It's a funny thing. You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database. But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is…

All those things are true. It still doesn’t sound like 1000+ engineers at 350k/yr. What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.

Twitter wasn't built by 1000 engineers at 350k/yr.

It had to hire them later on. Because when there are users - you need support, take out fires etc.

And this exact thing will happen with any homebrewed SaaS.

You either run a business or play tech company making your own saas instead of focusing on your business.

Sure you can do both in very rare cases - if you are SpaceX or similar, otherwise you are shooting yourself in the foot.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. It's a funny thing. You build a Twitter. Profiles have posts, posts can have images, etc. It's very easy to model the database. But then how do you make money with it? Now you need to build a separate system for advertising? Or do you want to sell subscriptions? Which means you need to build a separate system to handle payments. This is usually the big one, because when you handle money, what happens if there is…

All those things are true. It still doesn’t sound like 1000+ engineers at 350k/yr. What actually happens in a startup is you encounter these problems one at a time as they arise.

Startups have no users and no data to start with, and if they fuck up security, well, they just fail sooner than expected.

Once you get past a certain size, you have very different sorts of problems. Any idiot can vibe code a facebook lookalike, but the real one has to handle hundreds of millions of users and posts while being a target for state actors.

TLDR; yes you do need that many

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#529
post #316

Earlier 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…

>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. I mean in an example that almost happened... "you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses, Adobe buys it, you are paying 500k per year in Figma licenses" At least up until the point of vibe coding it was still worth the SaaS provider charging at least as much if not slightly m…

By that logic, people should never use any Saas products because someday the price will increase. Then why even use Claude Code, someday they will get sick of losing money and increase the price to $1000/month.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#530
post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It swings both ways though. I've seen plenty of older engineers dismiss the "new guys" effort and claim that everything had to be custom written, because there's no way a common framework like Django could cover their use case. The same type of engineer has never once worked with a common framework though, so they don't know what's included nowadays. Turns out it's a lot easier to build on top of a common framework t…

Sure I had an older dev do bit masking for a list of 3 options in javascript because he was used to old terminals. Its something different coming in and changing things here and there but rewriting the hole thing on a weekend is something different.

I was very impressed with vBulletin’s use of bitmasking for permissions (of which there were many possible combinations) when I first encountered it.

Would love an excuse to use it, but one has not come up in like 15 years since, hah.

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