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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#631

Post by itay-maman »

The term "B2B SaaS" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here and I think conflates two different things:

(1) Business model: hosted software you pay monthly for (vs self-hosted/one-time purchase)

(2) "Glue" products: tools like Monday.com that primarily provide synergy between data sources and workflows

The article is really about (2) - and yes, those are vulnerable to vibe-coding. If your product's core value is "we connect X to Y and show you a dashboard," that's now a weekend project.

But there's a huge category of SaaS where the value is in the product itself, not the integration layer. Take Excalidraw - fits the SaaS model, but try vibe-coding a collaborative whiteboard with real-time sync, proper data persistence, conflict resolution, export formats, etc. The hard problems aren't "connect API A to API B."

Or PostHog - sure you could vibe-code some analytics tracking, but building reliable event ingestion at scale, session replay, feature flags with proper rollout controls? That's years of engineering.

The "vibecodeable" SaaS products were always somewhat commoditized - AI just accelerated the timeline. The ones solving genuinely hard technical problems seem a lot safer to me.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#632

Post by WarmWash »

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…

> can accelerate in adding new features to their products

If anything AI helps companies escape the "feature wheel" that is used to justify exorbitant costs, while providing debatable (and often even negative) utility to the end user.

Keep in mind, Excel '98 would still probably be overkill for 85% of people's needs in 2025.

What companies thought was adding more utility, was actually just continually stacking costs in front of getting to that core functionality.

AI replaces the core functionality, and the "feature" scheme collapses...

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#633

Post by another_twist »

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…

Literally everything is a UI atop a database. Writing the data models, crafting the right uI and the right flows is non trivial. It requires iteration and that refinement is what customers pay for. The reality with SaaS stocks is they dont make anything critical. eg Take any large consumer tech company and they dont use Klaviyo. These companies build their own stack and one thats intimately connected with the data lake. It works for tech companies since they hve good data and it doesng work for non-tech companies because a good fraction of their data is trash.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#634

Post by stuxnet79 »

gspetr wrote: post #616
kavalg wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :) ).

This is the prime example of Law 1 of Robert Greene's "The 48 Laws of Power": "Never Outshine the Master." The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior. If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position. Galileo Galilei hand…

Sure it has been codified into a "law" but really this is just basic social skills / emotional intelligence which engineers on the spectrum struggle with.

If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.

Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.

Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#635

Post by erelong »

Sounds like a lot of products will be in trouble if AI becomes more advanced with producing secure code with maintenance processes to keep evaluating code on an ongoing basis

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#636

Post by CuriouslyC »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #621
CuriouslyC wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did they know something you didn't know, about that demo/client? i.e. misaligned incentives?

The opposite, they were 12 hours timeshifted and out of the loop managing a side hustle while I was interacting with the client daily.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#637

Post by WarmWash »

Customers don't want to pay for rolodex + 8000-data-point-visulization + integrated-automatic-contact-form-filling + assisted-real-time-closest-contact-scanning + 15 new-features-months + Annual-UI-rewrites + All-that-amazing-businesses-functionality-for-only-$199/usr/mo.

They want AI to vibecode a rolodex. And just use that. For 30 years if needed. 2000 LOC and a one time $20 cost.

The cancer of SaaS cannot die fast enough.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#638

Post by groundzeros2015 »

habinero wrote: post #535
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

What I meant is that most commercial software has a large number of code paths. Because it’s built incrementally, not holistically. This creates complexity and cost.

If you’ve only worked on that kind of software it’s hard to know the alternative which is to aggressively prune code paths and rework your main code.

And open source example is Quake. I rarely come across software whose inherent complexity is more than quake.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#640

Post by groundzeros2015 »

risyachka wrote: post #526
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yourse…

No. They hired 1000 people to help them justify funding rounds.

Even then, startups prioritize growth over efficiency. So maybe 100 people would have been fine but 1000 gets them a 5% growth improvement in growth.

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