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The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

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Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#71

Post by miki123211 »

mekoka wrote: post #52

Do some people really believe that SaaS margins are dropping because the public at large has discovered that to save 20$/month on some app they can instead vibe code their own and use that instead? My current guess about the future is that the age of SaaS is coming stronger than ever. I expect many vibe coders to come up with half-assed prototypes that will be copiously replicated and improved by more qualified devs…

SaaS companies have a big dilemma. Agents make your SaaS app more useful if there's no lock in and data is easy to access, but if that is the case, you have no lock in and the app is easy to migrate away from.

If you've already figured out what features are actually needed and which workflows work best, somebody can use AI to replicate those. This is the part of programming that AI is best at and accelerates most. The hard part, coming up with ideas, is far harder to copyright.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#72

Post by NikolaNovak »

autarch wrote: post #16
Ancalagon wrote: post #7

I don’t disagree if models stay as capable as they are today. But devils advocate: the point of the saaspocalypse isn’t just that anyone will be able to make their own software, it’s also that the AI will be good enough and interconnected enough to maintain it. The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting…

Imagine that you are a consultant. You get a call that starts with, "Hi, this is Joe Schmoe and Schmoe Law Firm. I need a new billing system. Can you build me one?" And you respond by saying that you can, but you need to do a _lot_ of work with him to spec this billing system out. You can't just build "a new billing system" without any more details. You tell him that this will take many hours of work between the two…

Think payroll. I used to think payroll is relatively simple. Then I spent some time on government of Canada Phoenix pay system (go ahead... Google and weep). And it's... Insane. System has been live for a decade and still regularly gets hit with some weird scenario from some department that nobody foresaw, it wasn't captured in requirements, but upon review by business analysts is a valid scenario. Bob was a CS5 in department of defense and speaks French so gets bilingual bonus and his boss was away for half a day so Bob gets acting cs5 pay and is in public alliance union so these are the dues, and it is second Tuesday of a month and blue moon, but then Bob got moved to department of agriculture and then 3 months later realized that his previous manager at defense didn't put in his promotion on time so now you have to figure out his retro pay for when he was in defense even though everything on his file now has agriculture labour agreement and codes and rates etc etc etc. And this made up example is a fraction of the complex examples.

Clear and comprehensive Requirements are always the tricky bit, at least in business software. Twilight zone covered it perfectly and presciently decades before AI, with genies taking your requests literally and giving you unpredictable and usually negative outcomes.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#73

Post by perrygeo »

SunshineTheCat wrote: post #15

The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS. The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble." I actually think the opposite is true. With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platform…

The default has been pay $x/month for every service. I've seen startups that require a dozen service accounts just to run the software, and dozens more to get onboarded org wide. One service for feature flags. One service for logs. One service for traces. One service for error handling. Another service for ticket tracking, which is completely separate from your planning, design, and CI services. Jesus. What do people hope to accomplish here besides just defering blame?

Replacing SAAS isn't about building a replacement services 1:1. It's about figuring out what you actually needed in the first place! Often we only use a tiny fraction of what the full-blown SAAS offers. IOW it's about eliminating the service entirely and building something that fits your actual needs, rather than following what some VC thinks your needs are.

AI or not, the "build vs buy" pendulum is now swinging hard to build. And IMO that's a real opportunity to consolidate, trim some fat, and actually apply engineering practices rather than just blindly signing up for every SAAS that crosses your path.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#75

Post by habinero »

perrygeo wrote: post #73
SunshineTheCat wrote: post #15

The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS. The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble." I actually think the opposite is true. With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platform…

The default has been pay $x/month for every service. I've seen startups that require a dozen service accounts just to run the software, and dozens more to get onboarded org wide. One service for feature flags. One service for logs. One service for traces. One service for error handling. Another service for ticket tracking, which is completely separate from your planning, design, and CI services. Jesus. What do people…

This fundamentally misunderstands a couple of things.

DIY software is "free" like a free yacht is free. It initially looks appealing but there's a lot of expensive hidden costs and upkeep and pitfalls and problems.

For one, this is a bad assumption:

> building something that fits your actual needs

Unless your business is very small and not growing, this is a moving target. Your needs are going to change as you grow and different groups in the org are going to have different needs.

You really don't want to be dicking around creating software that already exists instead of doing the shit that actually makes you money. Spending a few hundo thousand on a bunch of software is nothing, you spend that on one engineer.

You buy a SaaS product because you have a problem and want to throw money at someone else to deal with it.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#76

Post by habinero »

BloondAndDoom wrote: post #26

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS. It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

A lot of SaaS services have open source solutions that are the same, on par or better and yet people still pay for SaaS.

If they're not doing it now, why would they do it when they have to build it, too?

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#77

Post by habinero »

brianhama wrote: post #63

I couldn’t disagree with this more. And at least anecdotally I’ve seen the opposite. I have one friend who has built and launched an app for diagnosing skin disease from a photo. Do I think it’s a good idea? No, but he built it. I have another friend that has completely automated her job in accounts receivable. She literally doesn’t have to work anymore and her employer has no clue. And another friend of mine is cran…

Those aren't SaaS apps, that's (respectively) unlicensed practice, fraud, and a new hobby.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#78

Post by BloondAndDoom »

surgical_fire wrote: post #32
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #26

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS. It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

> It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. Is this already happening? Shouldn't it be? > In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it. That much is true.

AI coding really picked up 3 months ago, before that it wasn’t really delivering this levels. So if people started to work on stuff 3-6 months ago, yes I think we will start to see more competition. AppStore is already flooded.

The biggest problem is discoverability, doesn’t matter what you built if you cannot advertise it won’t matter. But there a lot fields where enterprise SaaS is 5-10K, if you cans build the same product and sell for 1K and make profit yet it will work. And just to be clear this is already working in tons of enterprise markets, there are small players who follows this strategy but this time 1-3 people will able to follow this strategy instead of 20, which is a game changer and will change the market forever. Not all but most big enterprises going grow much slower, and valuations will crash. It might take 2-5 years though, it’s just nature of SaaS, it takes a while to slow 100mph train.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#79

Post by BloondAndDoom »

fnoef wrote: post #30
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #26

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS. It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

Competing on price was never a good strategy. Moreover, price segmentation is still a thing. You can buy Chinese Rolex knockoffs for $7, but people still buy $10k Rolex.

It’s always been profitable (not Apple profitable), if I’m making $1M profit with 3 people team, isn’t that enough? You don’t think everyone always pay for the top products right, it’s why you have hundreds phone brands and car brands, tens or hundreds of software vendors in the same field and still make money.

If you don’t need 1M investment to start a business than tons of people will start those business around the world, and guess what some of them will be truly good, and people will use different tools, interoperability etc. will be much easier to solve with AI, so locking is not big deal, workflow integrations not big deal.

All of it will take time but surely will happen.

Re: The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

#80

Post by BloondAndDoom »

habinero wrote: post #76
BloondAndDoom wrote: post #26

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS. It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

A lot of SaaS services have open source solutions that are the same, on par or better and yet people still pay for SaaS. If they're not doing it now, why would they do it when they have to build it, too?

No they don’t, not the with same features set, not with the same quality, not with the same support and not with hosted capabilities. New AI world makes all these possible while still being cheaper and not funded by VCa and not owned by apes. Economics have changed
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