I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.
Although the proponents of this idea argue that companies will create and (!) maintain many tools in-house.
It’s not so much about running a business, since you don’t sell anything and only have internal customers.
When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever
They are not stupid, far from it, most are (very) high functioning sociopaths. And out and up there its everybody for themselves first.
what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?
Somehow that has not happened yet in 2026.
The second question is a valid one, and I think it will somewhat raise the bar of what successful SAAS vendors will have to offer in coming years
At the end of the day these decisions are all series of trade-offs, and the trick is understanding your requirements and capabilities well enough to make the right trade-offs.
2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app.
3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project.
5. Pain
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
I had quite a bit of success with it and of course, DKIM and the other measures you can take some years back.
For personal emails, I don't think I had any which fed straight into spam.
Maintenance is probably my number one reason for giving up on projects where I'm responsible for feeding the pet.
See jwz's struggles with hosting his own email. (Not linking to his blog here with HN as the referrer...)
With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.
No amount of LLM usage is going to change them into full stack vibe coders who moonlight as sysadmins. I just don't see it happening.
Not until, that is, a new generation, that has grown accustomed to the tech, takes over.
Until then the current SMBs will for the most part fulfill their IT needs from SaaS businesses (of which I think there will be more due to LLMs lowering the barrier for those of us who feel confident in our coding and sysadmin skills already).
Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
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.
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
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.
You get the same shocks with internal teams, just from other causes. And you have to manage them.
I'm sure you've only ever seen brilliant software created by internal software teams?
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.
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.
Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.
I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this.
Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
Of course, once AGI is available (if it is ever) everything changes. But for now someone needs to have the deep expertise.
I cannot imagine an SMB or fortune 500 ripping out Salesforce or SAP. However, I can see a point-tool going away (e.g., those $50/mo contracts which do something tiny like connect one tool to another.)
That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs.
If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
It used to be that your new b2b product has to try and displace a spreadsheet. Now it has to displace an agent.
How is it in any way B2B? At most B2C + freelancers / individuals / really small SME.
It didn't have any clues a med/large B2B would look for e.g. SSO, SOC2 and other security measures. It doesn't target reusability that I as a B would want. The provided blocks never work together. There aren't reusable components.
Tailwind UI or now Tailwind Plus is more like vibe coding pre-AI.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.
I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.
Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...
This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.
Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought
Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira
I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically
(this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools"
3. "Analysts are writing notes titled “No Reasons to Own” software stocks." - there is just one analyst saying this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stock...
4. Most of these SaaS tech stocks have been trading at all time highs...this smells of "explain something very complex with a simple anecdote"
EDIT: Oh lol, the author has a vibe coding SaaS offering...there ya go.
Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
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 providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.
Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc.
The F in SharePoint stands for fast
Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great!
It's not about the product it's about the results.
That maybe doable in your 10-people startup, Namanyay. Try doing it in a larger organisation with layers upon layers of firewalls, databases, authentication systems and not the least importantly - management. Not to mention the vastly different audience, both in size and interest. Your own experience is not the experience of everyone else.
I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc.
Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direction and we're (https://www.definite.app/) trying to beat them to it.
A given company or enterprise does not have to vibe code all this, they just need to make the 10 features with the SLA they actually care about, directly driven off the systems they care about integrating with. And that new, tight, piece of software ends up being much more fit for purpose with full control of new features given to company deploying it. While this was always the case (buy vs build), AI changes the CapEx/OpEX for the build case.
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".
AI will be used to do “excel better” more than “replace a managed, compliant, feature-rich-carefully-engineered, service”.
At the same time, I have no idea what the cost of LLMs usage will be in the future. So I'm working to ensure the architecture stays clean and maintainable for humans in case this kind of tooling becomes untenable.
If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally.
Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.
Failed/partial/expensive migrations is the name of the game with SaaS as well. Lock-in is the bottom line.
Migrations become much less scary when you truly own your data and can express it in any format you like. SaaS will keep sticking around, especially those that act like white-hat ransomware.
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.
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 <object> 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...
The new tools didn't shrink demand for COTS enterprise software - it grew massively since the 90s!
Most companies are not going to replace stable SaaS with a pile of AI-generated internal tools. They don’t want the maintenance or the risk.
If there’s a real B2B game changer, it’s Microsoft.
The day Excel gets a serious, domain-aware AI that can actually model workflows, clean data, and automate logic properly, half of these “build vs buy” debates disappear. People will just solve problems where they already work.
Excel has always been the real business platform. AI will just double down on that, not kill SaaS.
Best they can do is more adware in windows. Sorry.
Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus.
Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades.
This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management.
For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment.
I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.
The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road.
Lots of drudge work can be assisted by AI, especially if you need to do things like in ingest excel sheets or spit out reports, but I would run far away from anything vibe coded as hard as possible.
I rather use Excel. It's likely More robust and safer than the vibe coded app that could trigger data loss / incorrectness / issues any time.
One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few fields to a csv output.
So the total cost of XXX is in the 2M/year range, and it keeps ballooning.
My (4 men) team already takes care of the entire warehouse management process except inventory, the only thing that XXX provides, we literally handle everything: picking, manufacturing, packaging, shipping phase and many others.
In any case, nobody has mentioned vibe coding.
I stated that a handful of good engineers with the aid of AI in a couple of months can provide a working prototype to evaluate. In our case it's about extending our software that already does everything, except inventory management.
When you spend 2M/year on a software (1% of your revenue), growing every year by 100/150k it makes sense to experiment building a solution in house.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
A lot of companies have been too smart for that, and a lot of SaaS offerings are too small to be truly entrenched. Arguably the investment horizon is too short (IBM took decades getting to that point).
The only real vendors who managed to become the next IBM are the cloud providers.
Are they not able to just engage AI to solve those problems now? E.g. this morning I saw an app that did something interesting to me for $20 a month. 20 minutes in Gemini and I had a functional app that replicated the behavior. SaaS are more complex but give me a small team and a couple months and we could replicate most any of them.
The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.
- A company vibe codes their own app to replace a SaaS. Great when they only wanted a small chunk of the functionality. - Startups benefitting from AI coding are copying mature SaaS companies and competing on price. - Mature SaaS companies are branching out into each others domains. Notion is doing email. Canva is doing an office suite.
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, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead.
One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.
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).
Most people who've been in a business SaaS environment know that writing the software is relatively the easy part aside from in very difficult technical domains. The sales cycle + renewals and solution engineering for businesses is the majority of the work, and that's going nowhere.
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.
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
I’ve seen many startups recently were it was like “guys I could vibe code your ‘product’ in the afternoon.” Yes someone needs to look after it etc, but the bar on where companies buy vs build is getting much, much higher.
(Insert rant from dev teams about the code sucks, who will maintain it, etc). Yes all valid points, but things are changing regardless of if folks like it or not.
Probably one way SaaS companies will adapt is to break up their offerings into more modular low cost components. While many customers will end up paying less, the addressable market will probably increase because of the new low cost options.
To a degree but most enterprise focused software usually has differential pricing. Often that pricing isn't public so different companies get different quotes.
Unless you consider customer acquisition cost. Not considering cost of sales is one of the big mistakes software developer entrepreneurs make.
- Hey Claude, what is the project in XXXXX/ about and how does it work ? What should be improved there ?
What's changing is that agents + APIs are becoming a better delivery mechanism for many workflows than a UI you manually operate. A company paying $50k/year for a marketing analytics dashboard doesn't actually want a dashboard — they want answers about what's working. An LLM with API access to their data sources often delivers that faster than navigating someone else's opinionated interface.
The SaaS most at risk isn't infrastructure (Stripe, Twilio) or systems of record (Salesforce, Workday). It's the 'pretty UI on top of data you already own' tier — analytics, reporting, simple automation, basic CRM. That's where the compression happens. The products that survive will be the ones that become the system of record, or that offer value AI genuinely can't replicate (regulatory compliance, deep integrations with legacy systems, etc).
Are these companies unable to build a link shortener? It's also so easy to migrate off shortener service. If they can and still choose to use these shortening services, there must be other reason. And that reason is that they simply don't want to. This has nothing to do with AI.
I run a software company and one of the reasons customers say they want to migrate from their homegrown spreadsheet is because the guy who built it left. A freaking spreadsheet!
Such blog posts and probably many comments here are the perfect answer to "Tell me you don't run a real business without telling me you don't run a real business"
Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.
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 isn’t killing B2B SaaS. It’s killing B2B SaaS that refuses to evolve.
And all of those updates are just AI features.
Can you though? With major bugs? We've been getting more and more crashes, downtime, issues etc lately and a lot of it has had to do with vibe coding.
The whole point of these B2B SaaS is meant to be quality.
i.e. it's set users' expectations but in the wrong way.
How's that going for Microsoft?
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/2025-has...
Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’
I feel like there's an interesting story in there.
but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.
I've never seen a SaaS product that fits this description. There are always things to do. Libraries to upgrade, performance bottlenecks to diddle around with, an endless stream of nonsense feature requests from people at the customer who never actually use the product, fun experiments your developers want to try out, and so on.
The hard part in SaaS is to delete code, and that's what you should do, at least some of the time. Either through simplifications, or just outright erasing functionality that very few if any of your customers rely on.
What you should not do is let your customers grow the liability that is code in your production environment, unless your entire product set is designed to handle things like this, e.g. the business models of Salesforce and SAP.
You can shit out an app with AI, just like you could with Indian workers. But that doesn’t mean it will work properly or that you’ll be able to maintain it.
And most importantly, it only works for code they could steal from GitHub. It has no idea how to replicate sensitive systems which aren’t publically documented, and those are some of the most valuable contracts.
If your workforce is vibing all day, they will have no capacity for maintenance, because it isn't their code. So the maintenance that happens will be slop and more spaghetti. I am not saying cases like that never existed before, but such companies will face a moment of truth sooner or later.
First of all, many big companies pay a fortune to use inferior SaaS solutions instead superior Open Source solutions; possibly because one of their CTO may have received kickbacks or promises of a lucrative job at the SaaS provider as a consequence of this deal. There are a lot of politics going on behind the scenes when it comes to procurement.
Execs at big corporations are often looking for plausible ways to spend investors' money in a way that they can capture some of it for themselves. If they choose open source or they choose cheap vibe coded solutions; there is not much money changing hands. No opportunities for insiders to covertly monetize.
And then there are a lot of security implications to using a complex vibe coded app. The AI won't be able to identify the vulnerability in any decent sized codebase unless you know what you want it to look for.
1) The must-haves. These are your email and communication systems, the things you absolutely have to have up and available at all times to do business. While previously self-hosted (Exchange/Sendmail, IRC/Skype/Jabber, CallManager/UCS), the immense costs and complexities of managing systems ultimately built on archaic, monolithic, and otherwise difficult-to-scale technologies meant that SaaS made sense from a cost and a technical perspective. Let's face it, the fact nobody really hosts their own e-mail anymore in favor of Proton/Microsoft/Google/et al shows that self-hosting is the exception here, not the norm - and they're not going anywhere regardless of how bad the economy gets. These are the "housing stock" of business, and there's plenty of cheap stock always available to setup shop in without the need for technical talent.
2) The juggernauts. The, "we can do this ourselves, but the pain will be so immense that we really don't want to". This is the area where early SaaS solutions cornered and exploded in growth (O365, ServiceNow, Google Workspaces), because managing these things yourself - while feasible, even preferable - was just too cheap to pass up having someone else wrangle on your behalf with a reasonable SLA, freeing up your tech talent for all the other stuff. The problem is that once-focused products have become huge behemoths of complex features that most customers neither need nor use on a regular basis, at least after the initial pricey integration. Add in the ease of maintainability and scalability brought by containers or microservices, along with the availability and reliability of public cloud infrastructure, and suddenly there's more businesses re-evaluating their relationships with these products in the face of ever-rising prices. With AI tooling making data exfiltration and integration easier than ever from these sorts of products, I expect businesses to start consolidating into a single source of truth instead of using dozens of specific product suites - but not toppling any outright.
3) The nice-to-haves. The Figmas, the HubSpots, the myriad of niche-function-high-cost SaaS companies out there making up the bulk of the market. Those whose products lack self-hosted alternatives risk having vibe-coded alternatives be "good enough" for an Enterprise looking to slash costs without regard to long-term support or quality; those who compete with self-hosted alternatives are almost certainly cooked, to varying degrees. If AI tooling can crank out content similar in quality to Figma and the company has tech talent to refine it for long-term use, why bother paying for Figma? If AI tooling can crank out a CRUD UI for users that just executes standard REST API calls behind the scenes, then why bother paying for fancy frontends? While it's technically interesting and novel at how these startups solved issues around scaling, or databases, or tenancy, the reality is that a lot of these niche products or services could be handled in-house with a container manager, a Postgres instance, and a mid-level IT person to poke it when things go pear-shaped. The higher per-seat prices of a lot of these services make them ripe for replacement in businesses comfortable with leveraging AI for building solutions, and I expect that number to grow as the tools become more widely available and IT-friendly in terms of security.
Ultimately, the core promise of SaaS to business customers was all the functionality with none of the costs of self-hosting support. Nowadays, many of them have evolved into solutions that are more expensive than self-hosted options, and businesses that have shifted IT into public clouds or container-based systems have realized they can do the same thing for less themselves, at the cost of some UI/UX niceties in the process. Now that we (IT) can crank out integrations with local LLMs with little to no cost, we're finally able to merge datasets into singular pools or services - and I'm not talking about Snowflake or its "big data" ilk so much as just finally getting everything into Salesforce or ServiceNow without having to bring in consultants.
The must-haves and many of the juggernauts will remain - for now. It's the niche players that need to watch their moats.
Now with cloud maturity and Vibe coders who will get better and cheaper, I think it's possible to replace all the features we use on Salesforce at a fraction of the cost of our Salesforce licensing cost.
Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?
I was surprised when I saw the numbers from Bloomberg myself as well!
Although the article may also be hyperbolic, I'm not going to comment on reasons why it might be. Instead, I will agree, and think SaaS companies stock performance this year will be proof. Sure, it might not be the collapse that AI doomers are hoping for, but all the FUD they spread over the past few months to years will signal that they're not insulated from it. They made their cake, now they have to eat it too.
Enterprise sales basically works like this: A non-technical sales team aggressively promises everything to win a deal to a non-technical procurement or exec team. When the deal is won, the SaaS sales team tells engineers "go build this" regardless of how stupid it is. And the customer tells their employees "you now have to use this SaaS" regardless of whether it makes sense.
> And vibe coding is fun. Even Bret Taylor, OpenAI’s chair, acknowledges it’s become a legitimate development approach.
Color me shocked! Bret, who directly profits by how his product is perceived, thinks it's legitimate???? /s
??? Do you mean biased or do you mean impartial?