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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

- 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Unless you consider customer acquisition cost. Not considering cost of sales is one of the big mistakes software developer entrepreneurs make.

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.

Making the audit someone else’s problem is 90% of the ‘buy’ value in ‘build vs buy’

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.

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.

Since when does stock price / valuation have to match actual business realities?

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