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AI is killing B2B SaaS

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Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#81

Post by esafak »

conductr wrote: post #75
esafak wrote: post #47

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?

> Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? 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 procure…

Am I to understand your company wrote a CRM? What other applications did you replace? What company is this?

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#82

Post by falloutx »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #34
vemv wrote: post #25

It's not and I really doubt it will, for true SaaS platforms. A desktop .gif recorder (frequent example I've read about) is not a SaaS, even if you charge monthly for it. Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, it…

There are many cases where the company might only use a fraction of the features (and therefore complexity) of the SaaS and so only need to develop and maintain those features they actually need. That's when ditching the SaaS can make sense if you can easily develop/maintain what you specifically need on your own with AI assistance.

Even if they use it less, if you combine all of the Saas products used by a company, thats a tiny fraction of the overall CapEx. And this cost is tax deductible, so there is no reason to optimise it unless Execs are really penny pinching, but at that point that company isn't worth selling to anyway.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#83

Post by falloutx »

harundu wrote: post #33

Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. But, not sure which successful SaaS companies just stopped shipping any updates to the product, never talked to their customers and never added any new features to win over major new accounts - and still managed to survive and thrive? And the author actually confirms this: > AI…

> They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can.

And all of those updates are just AI features.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#84

Post by mschuster91 »

eli wrote: post #77

I don't really agree with this. 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 oft…

> 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.

And yet, precisely that happened in the end, just not with the tools envisioned. Excel, VBA and, where you had one knowledgeable employee, MS Access makes for incredibly powerful and incredibly hard to maintain "shadow IT" - and made even more difficult when someone sneaked in a password, because that takes a bit of an effort to remove [1], knowledge that is easy for us today to find, but not when I was young.

Also, back in the IE6 era, there was a lot of point-and-click created web interfaces... just that it wasn't HTML5 or even HTML. It was an tag loading some ActiveX written by some intern in VB6, or Java, or Flash. I sort of miss that era but also, it was a damn security nightmare. Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits, but at least it didn't run native code with full user privileges by design. I'm not kidding, theoretically you could go and import/use functions from any system DLL up to and including Kernel32. OLE/OCX, ActiveX... a design way ahead of its time.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/removing-the-pass...

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#85

Post by [deleted] »

metalrain wrote: post #50

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…

[deleted]

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#86

Post by kachapopopow »

kriro wrote: post #78

I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…

hard disagree, several b2b categories are going extinct because AI just completely replaced them.

I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#87

Post by colechristensen »

kriro wrote: post #78

I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically…

I'm considering SaaS replacements with in house code in situations where my general thoughts are "how can this possibly be the pricing for this?" which is not uncommon.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#88

Post by Hamuko »

spprashant wrote: post #61

Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.

The bus factor is gonna be pretty high if your enterprise relies on an internal tool that some guy at your company vibe coded at some point.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#89

Post by Hamuko »

harundu wrote: post #33

Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can. But, not sure which successful SaaS companies just stopped shipping any updates to the product, never talked to their customers and never added any new features to win over major new accounts - and still managed to survive and thrive? And the author actually confirms this: > AI…

>They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can.

How's that going for Microsoft?

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/2025-has...

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#90

Post by colechristensen »

metalrain wrote: post #50

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…

I just don't want to pay $50/user/month for an initially open source product that was relicensed and then crippled that the initial group giving something away decided they wanted to make a business of it.
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