Ask HN: Is Traditional SaaS Dying?
I think a good proxy for the question is: Does your employer try to replicate some SaaS features in-house? And do these experiments mostly succeed?
My data points: Two internal projects to replace Hubspot and Float. Hubspot will be kept, Float will be replaced.
The company I work for is in the process of replacing jira with an in home grown solution. They ran through a bunch of trial with pretty much every vendor under the sun looking for a replacement for jira, but none of them really sparked joy. Someone rolled their own a year or so ago, and it started gaining adoption, and people liked it enough that the whole company is switching to it.
I don't think that means saas is dead. There is a strong preference to buy instead of building if there is something worth buying.
Why would your company build a whole new jira just to manage tickets? What about cost and maintaince?
Its a big company, so the cost of jira is relatively comparable to a team building/maintaining our inhouse thing.
It also gets used for more than just ticket lifecycles. They are doing a lot of data analysis, and project management stuff.
High cost per-seat SaaS will die.
SaaS itself won't because it will always be easier to use existing software vs vibe code your own. The reason people are starting to roll their own is because with AI they can, and many SaaS products are still priced as if code is expensive.
I suspect in the future SaaS products may need to move to advertisement models rather than charging per seat. I also suspect successful SaaS products of the future will be much smaller and much more niche projects, with much smaller teams maintaining them.
This will take many many years to play out however. A large company using Salesforce today is going to find it extremely difficult to switch even if they want to.
I sorta expect the opposite. Anyone can build some small, niche SaaS themselves now. It's the giant, hulking behemoths (Salesforce, as one example) that can't be vibe-coded away easily. I suspect we'll see far more consolidation, and SaaS will also shift towards focusing far more on the enterprise. And so cost per seat will in fact increase, is my guess. But we'll see.
You might be right.
I guess I'd question if people are using Salesforce because it's actually the best tool for their business at the moment.
Historically I think the main reason large generic software platforms tended to win was because they catered for the largest share of market. And as a strategy this made sense when the market couldn't create decent competitor products tailored for every business niche because of the software cost.
Now that's not really a limitation anymore I think we're starting to see businesses shift towards software which is more tailored towards their specific business requirements, and away from these large generic platforms and products (like Salesforce).
That said, there probably is some complexity threshold. If a company needs a lot of the advanced functionality of Salesforce then perhaps there's less competition. I can see how a Salesforce has more of a software moat than some SaaS products.
Not necessarily; it depends on cost and stability. You don't need to develop everything yourself—in most cases, using existing solutions is more reliable.
I don't think so, its being reinvented, due to the massive AI boom, people can easily create 'their own' tools, tho ive realized building your own software needs updates, fixes, patches etc. which take a lot of time. So no, people try around but in the end most of them go back to the bought tools
I would not say it's dying at all, but certainly it's progressing. I'm working at a start up and we now try to build services at the first time which are we used to adapt as Saas
Data sovereignty is the critical factor. If bringing the data back in-house increases security, robustness then there might be a business case for replicating only that portion of the SaaS app that is actually being used.
Replicating software with AI is not zero cost issue. Not only do you need to pay for tokens used, but still have in-house tech and support costs to consider. Unlikely to be a strong business case for replication on those cost/ROI basis alone.
I'm going to let you in on an open secret of the industry: a lot of SaaS companies were already zombies, only running around because of the large amount of debt they managed to obtain during the ZIRP era.
I am self-employed but I'm tempted to replicated buffer in-house for my social media management. I feel that they are adding a bunch of pointless features while the core of the product is less and less stable.
i'm at an investment firm, we do late stage privates and publics. we've built inhouse alternatives for most of our company tracking saas that we used for outbound/sourcing. also built in house crm.
You built these now because of AI / LLMs made it easier or because because resources / willpower / management decided to do it _now_ as opposed to _before_ ?
LLMs made it easier
We’re already seeing bespoke saas for one.
The rise of DIY micro-SaaS for small businesses will obsolete some stuff, already seeing it, and partaking in it.
Gig workers too. They are already vibe coding solutions like car finding apps around ride sharing, booking engines for dog walking services, contact forms for personal coaches you might find on a flyer, etc.
For companies - it sometimes made sense before AI to build internal tooling, but it was kinda rare. And it never looked great. AI should expand and improve internal tooling, the software should look better, and be more thorough and useful. Maybe generally useful enough that more companies open-source their vibe coded solutions.
I've always loved SaaS that is open-source and you could self-host it if you wanted, but they offer a hosted version, and you still pay them because it's so convenient.
So maybe it doesn't die - the big stones (Salesforce, Hubspot) break down into smaller pebbles but there is still a lot of economic activity and tech innovation.
Personally I think there's a big opportunity for developers to try wildly new things, do things we already know but in totally new ways. Take the status quo off guard, surprise people with how easy this new way can be. But it's essentially nothing new, just a better way. And more thought into it - using the AI to do a lot more detail. A beautiful Victorian home vs a square bland house