The End of SaaS?
I'm curious with the latest trend of AI CEOs/hypsters talking about the "end of SaaS" and non-technical people replacing software tools with their own "vibe-coded" software... are people on here doing that already? If so, what specifically did you replace/build?
I think HN is good litmus test as a lot of people here are at least somewhat technical.
I'd describe myself as a decent mid-level-ish swe, currently building my own startup and I have 0 desire nor inclination to replace any of the software I currently pay for either personally or through my startup. I'm happy to outsource all of that thinking/work to someone else.
I'm also unconvinced by the argument that the pricing comes waaay down because it's so much faster/cheaper/easier to write software now - because while the delivery mechanism is new, cheap software development has been available for a long time. I know founders who paid someone in Pakistan/India ~$1k to build their platform. (Yes, it went exactly how you'd think it would) and I've seen non-technical founders who "vibe code" have a similar experience.
Is this all hot air? When I see this "end of Saas" being touted and then look at my experience using these tools + building my own startup and interacting with customers.. I just don't see any of our customers even coming to close to considering "building it themselves" or even asking why our product doesn't cost like 5 bucks a month.
I'm looking for people who back the "end of SaaS" position and I want to know what it is you're seeing on the ground. What tools are being replaced and how?
ime high quality software is still hard and it takes quite a lot thought, time, good design and testing (before you even deploy it!) - "generating" the code is often not the bottleneck and the idea that I'm going to go and whip up my own postmark/S3/G-suite/CRM just seems crazy to me. No - aaS is not going anywhere ... for precisely the reasons you already articulated: "I have 0 desire nor inclination to replace any of the software I currently pay for either personally or through my startup" Businesses should outsource [almost] every non-core functionality to someone else Unless it becomes so business-critical that it absolutely positively MUST be done in-house, go to a reliable vendor and pay them for their expertise Programmers already* do this by using libraries when they write software (yeah, you learned how to build a graph data structure and implement a binary search tree in your second or third degree year, but you have never done it since - because the versions that exist in either language-supplied or community-based libraries are just plain better) The days of "do it all yourself" are - blessedly - decades behind us now Use the best* tools for the job, and worry about delivering your product/service to your customers ----- * "best" may vary over time - cost, language, availability, etc are all factors in determining this for you We replaced two minor SaaS vendors this week with vibe coded alternatives, so yes I do think that it's real. Our core systems like HRIS, ERP, Github, email, etc. no and no plans to replace or foresee being able to replace those ones. I'd love to know what of products these were if you're able to share! Gitbook and Webflow replaced with our own homegrown static sites on VitePress. What part of Github makes it irreplaceable for your organization? It depends on the company. In a certain sense, many SaaS products are more "software" than "service" and are therefore dead-on-arrival when competitors can undercut them or provide a local alternative. We've all seen the $10/mo AI inference apps that nobody uses, or the many transcription services that died with on-device NLP going mainstream. So... AI accelerates the demise of stupid businesses and reinforces the value proposition of irreplaceable services. As a whole I would say that is a negative to a market that relies on "disruption" economics to stay afloat and continue raising capital. Yeah agree that AI/LLMs will replace _certain_ types of software products! I also believe someone could build/replace a product with 100% LLM written code - I just don't believe the effort involved in the building/maintenance of it is so low that it's worth doing. The idea that you can write one sentence and get a masterpiece of software that meets your needs is delusional and I’m shocked that it gets as much currency as it does here. I asked Copilot to tell me how to clear out a a RabbitMQ queue and it gave me a great answer. I asked it to write me a Python script that solves Tower of Hanoi, same thing. In both cases it is a well-defined task and I don’t care about how it is done. Applications software is different. If you farm out a task to offshore developers you are either going to have to document every. little. detail. (India) or get a spike of work which might get between 0-40% of the way there and come back with detailed feedback through several cycles (China) Maybe an A.I. coder could work with you intensively to get your needs met, but it’s not going to be “implement user authentication” and then it is done unless your definition of done is launching and getting a call the next night that somebody logged in without a password. Even so, AI does make people more productive and it will shift buy vs build discussions towards build. I agree. I can get behind people using AI to build/replace stuff, but if it's anything beyond stupidly simple it's going to require a lot of thought and time - even if that ends up being time spent writing increasingly detailed prompts and testing the output instead of writing code directly. >The idea that you can write one sentence and get a masterpiece of software that meets your needs is delusional and I’m shocked that it gets as much currency as it does here. Remember Z language? Or UML? Languages that were supposed to be able to generate a perfect piece of software based on a perfect spec? Yeah ... those went nowhere :) Why is the text grayed out on posts like this? Think my account has been flagged sadly!