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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#531

Post by habinero »

mym1990 wrote: post #230
g947o wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It that works, nobody would be using Jira anymore, because people would just use a competitor that's cheaper or vibe code their internal Jira tool. Somehow that has not happened yet in 2026.

This is because what management wants and what builders want are not aligned, not because the quality of JIRA is so amazing that no other alternative could ever be created. JIRA is fine but many people I know that use have some qualms with it because the bloat is pretty crazy.

Yeah, I moved my team to Jira and sold it as "yes Jira is terrible but all the others are much worse".

I also spent a solid two weeks in the admin panel chainsawing as much Jira bloat as I could. It's perfectly adequate now.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#532

Post by yasdevae »

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…

[dead]

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#533

Post by juleiie »

kavalg wrote: post #512
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…

In the beginning of my career, I've been once told by my senior management that I should never again: 1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress). 2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).

Just smear the heck out of them to stakeholders, after implementing something big and climb over these incompetent shmucks and watch their fall

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#534

Post by juleiie »

November_Echo wrote: post #425
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…

> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such. Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

replace your boss

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#535

Post by habinero »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #391
alphager wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this happen with both juniors and seniors. They do come back with a working solution /for the happy path/. Because the happy path is easy. It turns out that most of the complexity sits in the unhappy paths.

I still don’t agree. The trick to good design is getting more things on the happy path. Most of the software I use is small and constructed in this manner.

"They only coded the happy path" is software engineer for "they coded it as if nothing would ever go wrong". It is definitely not good design to do that.

There's an engineering trap/fallacy I like to call "how hard could it be". How hard could it be to build a [whatever] clone? If you find yourself thinking that, stop what you're doing, because the answer is almost always "at least an order of magnitude harder than you think."

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#536

Post by Snoddas »

oblio wrote: post #490
badc0ffee wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

> With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem. I have a 15+ year old Gmail account that I've used everywhere. Spam has been a non issue since 15+ years ago.

Your experience isn’t representative. Mine isn’t either.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#537

Post by nosianu »

kstrauser wrote: post #432
November_Echo wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such. Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything. Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app . It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No o…

> Honestly, I don’t want to be.

I don't get it.

On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.

Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.

If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.

Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#538

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

cj wrote: post #288
brianwawok wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My log bill for Google cloud log would be like 30k. For splunk I like 80k. I self host for 1.5k per month. Spend maybe an hour a month? Easiest money I ever made.

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…

Oh come on, nobody uses the cloud because of support! Let's be real now.

99% of the time a cloud migration is because of OpEx/CapEx accounting shenanigans.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#539

Post by cdf »

The keyword in "Software as a Service" is not Software; it's the Service.

In the early days, the tagline for Salesforce is "No Software". It's secret recipe is this: your sales team only need a browser and a credit card, to get the service. No software installation needed. Even if you have a genius can code something equivalent, it will never be a "service". That genius is not going to support it, not going to add storage for you, not going to restore an accidentally deleted record for you. That takes an army to deliver. It is a service.

Of course, Marc Benioff kind of shot himself in the foot by trying to get ahead of the AI curve... and gutted their customer service division. If the service is delivered by AI agents, what is the selling point again over other AI agents? They have debased their key strengths and are getting punished for it.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#540

Post by CyanLite2 »

gondar wrote: post #437
CyanLite2 wrote: post #414

The real story isn't that some enterprise mega corp is going to vibe-code their own Workday. The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.

But if you are a mega corp, spending 0.1% of your CapEx on SaaS subscriptions, do you really want to switch to products made by some no name one person startup? You might save 0.05% of your CapEx, but if something didn’t workout, your whole business will be screwed.

To your point, I think there are 3 main categories:

1. Too big to fail (SalesForce, ServiceNow, ServiceTitan, Shopify). They’re targeting megacorps’ core business operations. Switching costs are too high. They will survive,

2. B2B non-core (PagerDuty, Vanta, Monday, Atlassian). They’re going to have stiff competition and most here will fail or merge/consolidate. They have the most to lose because they’re non-core to a business’s success and pricing pressures will cause many of them will be easily vibecoded with enough time. The large TAM here will attract hundreds of competitors each.

3. Consumer SaaS (Notion, Canva, Grammarly, Dribbble). They're good as dead and can be buried.

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