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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#591

Post by ThatPlayer »

ozim wrote: post #279
vdfs wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same with „building custom businesses stuff” you can already do it quicker with existing CRM configuration without burning tokens.

Yeah I know a friend (small business owner) vibe coding a feature as a addon for Odoo. He has dreams of selling it (he usually has wild plans), but for now it's just a feature they want and does seem to be good enough for their use.

And the Google AI subscription is cheaper than any of the SaaS offerings.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#592

Post by donohoe »

philipmoses wrote: post #557

It’s about the "Per User Tax" The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database. I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an…

That’s great. The overhead is that you have to host it and maintain the environment and app. If there is downtime that’s now your responsibility.

If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#593

Post by CuriouslyC »

yunohn wrote: post #581
juleiie wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

While probably facetious, those with power (who you aim to smear and replace) will save themselves and work together to fire you ASAP. This is not a winnable battle nor strategy for success, unfortunately.

This 100%. I once got disciplined for insubordination for skip-leveling my "manager" and disregarding their instructions when she started telling people on the team to work on something totally non-critical, when the team had a demo in a few days that wasn't ready yet, with a client that was already unhappy, on an 8 million dollar contract.

I didn't hang around that place long.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#594

Post by laurentiurad »

What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive.

It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One needs to factor financials into the equation to explain a downtrend. Take Figma for example, spending 109 mil on AWS bills, cutting through their margins. Investors know that such costs do not simply go down due to the vendor lock-in companies experience when using cloud services.

Claude Code is good, but definitely far away from being able to vibe code Figma.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#595

Post by fsloth »

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 :) ).

IMHO I think the best any engineer can do in an org is to ask "what is the highest value problem to solve for the business" and "can I solve it".

"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.

That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.

There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.

But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.

So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.

A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.

Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.

So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#596

Post by dbuxton »

laurentiurad wrote: post #594

What the authors of this kind of doomer-type articles do not realize is that B2B software companies have the data that their customers pay for, and they also have access to the AI tools themselves, meaning they can accelerate in adding new features to their products, making them more competitive. It's a fallacy to consider the bad performance of software stocks as a definite sign that AI is going to replace them. One…

I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.

Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.

Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#597

Post by ryanackley »

resonious wrote: post #589
thinkindie wrote: post #565

I have few sticks in the sand in my thinking framework: * writing code has always been the easiest part of building software, deciding what to do and what not to do is something else that takes forever sometimes * there are several open source projects that can replace commercial SaaS and still people prefer to purchase commercial SaaS. These are available immediately, deployed immediately etc etc. * along the same l…

> writing code has always been the easiest part Let me provide some possible evidence against this: so many teams are desperate to rewrite their codebase but struggle to actually do so. And when they finally make the leap, it takes them 5x as long as they had hoped. Then sometimes the new code isn't even any easier than the old code. I personally find writing code to be a huge time suck and I'm very happy that AI hel…

Most of a software project's lifetime will be spent as a maintenance challenge. i.e. How do we add the 237th feature without adding to the performance problems that already exist. Hence, the desire to rewrite the codebase to incorporate the abstractions of all 236 features.

I don't see AI helping with this. From my experience, it seems like the opposite. It can help you write the code after you've deconstructed the problem yourself and know how to keep it in check.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#598

Post by kloop »

mittensc wrote: post #186
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…

what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?

You're ignoring the biggest part of SaaS as far as management is concerned.

There's a large, stable entity that management can sue if something goes very wrong.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#599

Post by girvo »

g947o wrote: post #213
mittensc wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what if this time it's senior developers and they actually can slap something together better then the expensive SAAS offerings? what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?

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.

The market seems convinced it will happen, considering its stock price is in the gutter

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#600

Post by hermannj314 »

donohoe wrote: post #592
philipmoses wrote: post #557

It’s about the "Per User Tax" The panic over SaaS vs AI is simpler than people think. For years, we’ve been paying "Enterprise" prices for tools that are essentially just a UI on top of a database. I'm a solution architect, and we recently looked at the $30/user/mo price tag for legacy test management tools. It’s insane. Why am I paying a "per user per month tax" for a glorified spreadsheet when I can pay $20 for an…

That’s great. The overhead is that you have to host it and maintain the environment and app. If there is downtime that’s now your responsibility. If that’s better than $x/month to be someone else’s problem then it’s a win.

Is there a middle ground that hasn't emerged yet?

Someone to host and manage your SLop-As-A-Serivce (SLAAS) for a price point in the middle.

That feels like a business.

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