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I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?
Imagine working at a company who has it own Figma, Docker etc... Thats a recipe for disaster.
I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B test…
And in many cases, it's 12 features, with 2 of the features not even existing in the big SaaS. I'm pretty sure every developer who has dealt with janky workflows in products like Jira has planned out their own version that fits like a glove, "if only I had more time".
I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
> it's quality, availability, price, etc. Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc. The F in SharePoint stands for fast
I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
That 2nd S is sometimes engineered into the product design to maximize vendor lock in, and consulting revenue.
I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?
Yes, a lot.
> Who's taking care of it?
It's not hard.
We wouldn't do it for tools that are purpose made and have sane pricing in the market place. We do it for stuff that would traditionally go on a 'platform' like Salesforce or something that requires a lot of customization to begin with. It's so much easier to just roll your own than even just going through the procurement process of those kinds of tools much less the integration and change process (hiring consultants, etc). I'm not hands on with it, but I know our small group of AI are helping us eliminate $5m recurring annual spend this year and that's directly impacting the topic article. I won't be surprised if at some point we replace our more sticky ERP software or use this leverage to negotiate prices that are sane. Businesses have been gouged by enterprise software long enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty much. My employer was looking to cut costs and they were spending ~500k a year on a product that does little more than map entra roles/groups to datasets and integrated with a federated query engine through a plugin. Took a couple days to build a replacement. The product had only a few features we needed.
As niche SaaS provider, I'm trying to avoid succumbing to the same fate. The product I built carefully for years would now be within the reach of a senior dev with a couple focused weeks -- if they knew all the requirements. To avoid being overtaken, I'm working to increase my customer's requirements -- getting them hooked on new reports and features I never had time to build before LLMs could do it for me. This make…
Simple CRUD app sure, but we're nowhere near being able to vibe code even a relatively low-complexity enterprise SaaS product.
If it's got customer data in it and/or you're making important business decisions based on it, you really need your system to be accurate and secure. My experience is the people who procure enterprise software know this and tend to care a lot about it. They often have legal and contractual obligations around that.
In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers.
I don't think it is killing SaaS. I have definitely had to extend my sales cycle when a potential customer vibe-coded a quick fix for a pain point that might have triggered a sale a few weeks earlier, but eventually the benefit delivered by someone else caring about the software as their entire mission really wins out over a feature here and there. If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is valid…
I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service. When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them. AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S. Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc. Service provi…
They didnt, dont make the mistake of thinking Saas companies are just software companies. They are Sales companies who happen to sell software. Companies like Dropbox & Atlassian have long been surpassed in Tech but they live only because they continue selling even when demand was hard to get. Their moat is sales & networking and software has to be just good enough. And other part is service, these companies still ha…