Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is killing B2B SaaS

nmn.gl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 752 posts

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#91

Post by echelon »

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, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got.

B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.

Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.

I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.

If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#92

Post by monero-xmr »

colechristensen wrote: post #87
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.

Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#93

Post by eli »

mschuster91 wrote: post #84
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 h…

Software got easier to develop, but we just came up with more problems to solve with software.

The new tools didn't shrink demand for COTS enterprise software - it grew massively since the 90s!

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#94

Post by conductr »

esafak wrote: post #81
conductr wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Yes to some extent. We wrote a CRM that works for what we needed. It's not a full blown SaaS product we could sell to any company as a tenant, as they would all want other features that aren't important to us. This is what happens during an implementation anyways, we only implement what we care about.

No names, but my company is service companies (mostly residential) - many logos with different verticals (think electric, hvac, etc). Having a SaaS CRM that served all our brands needs was always a challenge and made aggregating anything difficult (we basically were running multiple CRMs)

We were using dozens of SaaS tools per logo - and just going through them all and figuring out what features we need/want and rolling them into the larger system. We've also built handful of things for internal operations, finance, etc

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#95

Post by falloutx »

echelon wrote: post #91
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, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got. B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane pr…

> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.

I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#96

Post by echelon »

monero-xmr wrote: post #92
colechristensen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is de…

How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating?

These are real risks to these companies.

Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#97

Post by llmslave »

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…

how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins.

i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#98

Post by echelon »

falloutx wrote: post #95
echelon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got. B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane pr…

> And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them. I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.

Metrics at a fintech processing billions of dollars of daily GPV, plus the signals from every microservice in the constellation are enormous. Huge scale time series data.

We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.

Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#99

Post by falloutx »

echelon wrote: post #96
monero-xmr wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is de…

How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating? These are real risks to these companies. Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting. I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source…

> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous.

If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma

Re: AI is killing B2B SaaS

#100

Post by nozzlegear »

> AI is killing B2B SaaS

Anecdata sample size of one, but this is not my experience at all. My business has only continued to grow over the past couple years, and I don't think I've had a single customer mention AI to me at all (over the phone or email).

Post reply on HN