I hope there's some forced migration of the SaaS business model towards primarily being "just an API" for whatever magic sauce it is they have. Too much of SaaS moats are just locking the backend behind an undocumented API.
Users should be able to have full control over their experience interacting with third parties if they want it. This isn't unique to post-LLM stacks like this, but it seems like this shifts the balance of power.
The next step after injecting custom UI controls is to build completely alternative frontends. The next step after that should be to build generic local frontends that abstract over multiple comparable thirdparty providers.
First, is a 500 because you are using the API in a way that is unexpected a customer found defect? If Claude can't find the answer, what is the expectation of support?
If an internal team makes a change that breaks your workflow (because it was an unexpected use case), is that a CFD?
Do teams slow down in new features because the API must be the stress test of a public api?
I'm fine with unsupported frontends but an external API will be very difficult to keep static.
The last company I worked for before going into consulting full time was a startup where I was the then new CTOs first technical hire. The company before then outsourced the actual technical work to a third party consulting company until they found product market fit.
His primary mandate was API and micro service first.
Our customers were large health care systems.
We had a customer facing website that was built on top of the same APIs that we sold our customers.
Our customers paid for the features they wanted and those features were available on our website, they were used for their website and mobile apps and the ETL process was either via a file they sent us and we ran through the same APIs or they could use our APIs directly for both online and batch processes.
This is no different from the API mandate Bezos made at Amazon back in 2000.
You don’t have to keep an API static - that’s what versioning is for.
I think the talking point is maintaining a well versioned and solid API as product is way harder than shipping a few screens that can change whenever you need them to. (behind those screens being a bunch of duct tape to a clusterF of internal APIs). no guarantees.
what you're saying is that you were at a company that did that hard thing of shipping APIs as product.
Nice vision, "alternative frontends" is something really useful for horizontal SaaS. We do this for over 2000 customers, from field workers to CEOs of public companies, and it's so satisfying to hear the great feedback when they tell me that they finally have software perfectly adapted to their workflows.
If attention-span was shot with social-media, it has no chance in the age of AI. All these deep tech-tools potentially have tons of value, but if it doesn't make sense in 5 seconds, very hard to compete.
I think the right step would be to somehow communicate to the vendor that this feature is needed (eliminating the PM backlog BS) and their coding Agents should pick it and build it. The real moat they have is SaaS vendors have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
That introduces a level of indirection between "what I want" and what gets built. A workflow like the OP just has less friction. SaaS platforms would want to provide more stable accessible APIs if it becomes a popular model, because users would find it more usable.
these embeddable UI could be a direct ask on how users want a workflow, the SaaS vendors can distribute the embeddable UI and see if it clicks with a lot of users. Would push them to create a stable API
> have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
This could not be more wrong. Features do, because telling a user they can do X comes with a standing promise that it works, the results are correct, the ui is accessible, the feature cleanly interacts with all other features in the system (both now and in the future), corner cases are worked out, etc. And that burden is where prod+eng spend time.
There is an entire industry of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow consultants and almost any other major SaaS app that you can hire to customize the app based on public APIs. I can’t imagine choosing any mission critical SaaS app without publicly documented APIs
Surprised this is your take coming from a UX designer. You think a straight path for every user to add their feature ideas results in a good UX?
edit: reading further into this, the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them. That's not a bad take, but even in that world, I wouldn't think UX and product disciplines become exposed for having no value at all.
My take in this (ironic) comment was just "no feature is free", which I don't think should be odd coming from a UX designer!
> the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them
I do find this interesting. I work on a complex business operations and reporting platform and every facility has their own lil quirks. More control in their hands would let them smooth out their workflows while still relying on the foundational work our platform does.
Ah, I didn't register the sarcasm. Typical HN, it's probably why you're downvoted.
Yes, today's HN session has me nerd-sniped about what the future of product development looks like. I've been thinking how mock-to-prototype is just too slow when engineers can ship so much so fast. Eng needs design direction especially when it's too easy to "solve design" with tailwind components and "You're a designer from a top saas company" prompts.
But what if the new UX is less visual-first and more IA, primitives and well structured object models... now that has me thinking.
Nice post and I agree that making software with really simple UX for last mile cases is the solution to the SaaS-pocalypse and is something new that was not possible before AI.
I'm solving this from the other side of the equation: we work directly with the SaaS vendors to make vibe coding embedded into their platform. Working with some Series B companies right now, 2000 business users are now able to build any feature they want, within the guardrails of the SaaS vendor. (More info in profile if anyone wants to chat)
I don't have a horse in this race, but this seems the right way to me. As a developer, I do already inject custom scripts to provide extra functionality / automation on SaaS I use where APIs are not available or limited.
However, the thought of the non-technical users I work with doing that is scary, they have no idea if the code the LLM writes is correct, is it going to have a bug that causes a massive issue down the line?
I've seen fat finger errors cause financial loss, but at least in those cases the user always had a chance to realise their error and fix it, with something like this how would you even know?
ty! any CEOs or product people at SaaS companies that come to mind to reach out to? I've been trying to get this in front of more people, so far they're always mind blown when they see how the product works
Although I absolutely understand the frustration expressed by the author, I find the notion that SaaS companies are somehow 'evil' because they optimize for the 80/20 rule a bit arrogant. Anyone working in SaaS - or really in any business- understands that you need to prioritize. In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits. And that's absolutely OK.
>In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
Moloch demands babies be scarified to generate maximum profits!
For one, this is a very US concentric way of thinking. Secondly, if a human person thought like this we'd consider them to be an anti-social psychopath, which directly conflicts with the more recent SCOTUS ruling that companies are humans too.
So, yes, we have legally mandated companies be evil. It's been working out well for us in the US as prices skyrocket and any competition is bought up or abused with patents/IP.
> In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
No denying that. SaaS started with a user problem at the center of it and as they scaled, forgot about an individual user. This only presents the user frustration and a possible solution to it.
If you're building for individual users you're not going to succeed. We all prioritize for broad success from the beginning.
I'm very into the idea of inversion of control and giving users this flexibility but I agree with GP that the SaaS company critique is misplaced. I hope you find enough success with 100X that you end up coming to the same conclusion.
I'll also add that one of your video examples is essentially a Twitter spam generator; is that the kind of feature you think SaaS companies should be prioritizing?
I created that twitter responder after reading this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568028). That wasn't to call out what SaaS companies should prioratise but to show how easy it would be for a user to do it.
SaaS needs to be reinvented. We need backend platforms which provide more security controls, more flexibility in terms of data-sharing, seamless access by AI agents with advanced access controls; e.g. some agents can define schemas, some agents read data, other agents write data, some agents curate data... And custom app frontends can be generated on demand and integrate data from many different sources. This is what I've been working towards with https://saasufy.com/
Solves yesterday's problem. The calcification is UI calcification, and agents don't care about UIs. An MCP server (or a half-decent OpenAPI surface) lets a user-controlled agent compose vendor primitives without touching the DOM, without TOS risk, without overlay maintenance. IoC doesn't get forced by extensions. It gets forced by agents that can read docs and click buttons faster than the vendor can ship features. The vendors who notice will expose that surface voluntarily, because the alternative is getting scraped anyway.
This bothers me. ALL enterprise SaaS prohibits reverse-engineering in its TOS and CSA and most prohibit bots and automation. So, the buyer will need the vendor's explicit permission to use something like 100x; and when the vendor has something on the roadmap, even if it's delayed, there's little chance that the vendor will give this permission. Anybody else bothered by this? Anybody who has a successful workaround?
This is essentially a smarter auto-clicker. I'm not sure I'd call it "reverse engineering".
A TOS/CSA should in no way ever attempt to prohibit automation, and if it does, it (generally) deserves to be disrespected.
There is a legitimate concern however about customer resource use escalating beyond what was expected when the price was set. Luckily this can be written as a simple black and white determination without any complicated gray areas, and is therefore easily enforced both in the code and in the contract.
users didnt ask for slow apis either but there they are. I am speaking for the user here and sharing their frustration. Allowing UI modification to fit the user needs should be a default now. The APIs already act as a gaurdrail on what's possible
Configurability in moderation is fine, but go too far and users can hurt each other. JIRA is famous for this: managers customize the life out of it at others' expense.
I hope there's some forced migration of the SaaS business model towards primarily being "just an API" for whatever magic sauce it is they have. Too much of SaaS moats are just locking the backend behind an undocumented API.
Users should be able to have full control over their experience interacting with third parties if they want it. This isn't unique to post-LLM stacks like this, but it seems like this shifts the balance of power.
The next step after injecting custom UI controls is to build completely alternative frontends. The next step after that should be to build generic local frontends that abstract over multiple comparable thirdparty providers.
So, it's just changing the problem up a level.
First, is a 500 because you are using the API in a way that is unexpected a customer found defect? If Claude can't find the answer, what is the expectation of support?
If an internal team makes a change that breaks your workflow (because it was an unexpected use case), is that a CFD?
Do teams slow down in new features because the API must be the stress test of a public api?
I'm fine with unsupported frontends but an external API will be very difficult to keep static.
The last company I worked for before going into consulting full time was a startup where I was the then new CTOs first technical hire. The company before then outsourced the actual technical work to a third party consulting company until they found product market fit.
His primary mandate was API and micro service first.
Our customers were large health care systems.
We had a customer facing website that was built on top of the same APIs that we sold our customers.
Our customers paid for the features they wanted and those features were available on our website, they were used for their website and mobile apps and the ETL process was either via a file they sent us and we ran through the same APIs or they could use our APIs directly for both online and batch processes.
This is no different from the API mandate Bezos made at Amazon back in 2000.
You don’t have to keep an API static - that’s what versioning is for.
I think the talking point is maintaining a well versioned and solid API as product is way harder than shipping a few screens that can change whenever you need them to. (behind those screens being a bunch of duct tape to a clusterF of internal APIs). no guarantees.
what you're saying is that you were at a company that did that hard thing of shipping APIs as product.
Nice vision, "alternative frontends" is something really useful for horizontal SaaS. We do this for over 2000 customers, from field workers to CEOs of public companies, and it's so satisfying to hear the great feedback when they tell me that they finally have software perfectly adapted to their workflows.
the url for your company in your profile is misspelled.
Ty fixed! Allow me to blame it on the lack of sleep as I'm in the current yc batch.
Good luck! The premise sticks immediately.
If attention-span was shot with social-media, it has no chance in the age of AI. All these deep tech-tools potentially have tons of value, but if it doesn't make sense in 5 seconds, very hard to compete.
I think the right step would be to somehow communicate to the vendor that this feature is needed (eliminating the PM backlog BS) and their coding Agents should pick it and build it. The real moat they have is SaaS vendors have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
That introduces a level of indirection between "what I want" and what gets built. A workflow like the OP just has less friction. SaaS platforms would want to provide more stable accessible APIs if it becomes a popular model, because users would find it more usable.
these embeddable UI could be a direct ask on how users want a workflow, the SaaS vendors can distribute the embeddable UI and see if it clicks with a lot of users. Would push them to create a stable API
> have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
This could not be more wrong. Features do, because telling a user they can do X comes with a standing promise that it works, the results are correct, the ui is accessible, the feature cleanly interacts with all other features in the system (both now and in the future), corner cases are worked out, etc. And that burden is where prod+eng spend time.
There is an entire industry of Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow consultants and almost any other major SaaS app that you can hire to customize the app based on public APIs. I can’t imagine choosing any mission critical SaaS app without publicly documented APIs
> The real moat they have is SaaS vendors have everyone believe that trivial feature requests take time to implement.
So true. People are going to be sooo mad when they find out we all have these Build Features For Free buttons and just don't press them.
Surprised this is your take coming from a UX designer. You think a straight path for every user to add their feature ideas results in a good UX?
edit: reading further into this, the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them. That's not a bad take, but even in that world, I wouldn't think UX and product disciplines become exposed for having no value at all.
My take in this (ironic) comment was just "no feature is free", which I don't think should be odd coming from a UX designer!
> the idea is perhaps that users vibe-code their own distinct UX with everything valuable to them
I do find this interesting. I work on a complex business operations and reporting platform and every facility has their own lil quirks. More control in their hands would let them smooth out their workflows while still relying on the foundational work our platform does.
Ah, I didn't register the sarcasm. Typical HN, it's probably why you're downvoted.
Yes, today's HN session has me nerd-sniped about what the future of product development looks like. I've been thinking how mock-to-prototype is just too slow when engineers can ship so much so fast. Eng needs design direction especially when it's too easy to "solve design" with tailwind components and "You're a designer from a top saas company" prompts.
But what if the new UX is less visual-first and more IA, primitives and well structured object models... now that has me thinking.
Doesn’t sound like you have much experience in software businesses.
Nice post and I agree that making software with really simple UX for last mile cases is the solution to the SaaS-pocalypse and is something new that was not possible before AI.
I'm solving this from the other side of the equation: we work directly with the SaaS vendors to make vibe coding embedded into their platform. Working with some Series B companies right now, 2000 business users are now able to build any feature they want, within the guardrails of the SaaS vendor. (More info in profile if anyone wants to chat)
Exciting times!
I don't have a horse in this race, but this seems the right way to me. As a developer, I do already inject custom scripts to provide extra functionality / automation on SaaS I use where APIs are not available or limited.
However, the thought of the non-technical users I work with doing that is scary, they have no idea if the code the LLM writes is correct, is it going to have a bug that causes a massive issue down the line?
I've seen fat finger errors cause financial loss, but at least in those cases the user always had a chance to realise their error and fix it, with something like this how would you even know?
I'm glad to hear that it resonates! And yes, being able to provide a guardrailed environment has been the biggest problem that we're solving.
Now every customer can get the power of Claude Code and vibe coding in a safe and controlled environment.
your profile's blog link 404s
Fixed https://nmn.gl/blog
Right on. (Smart take on SaaS, too, BTW)
ty! any CEOs or product people at SaaS companies that come to mind to reach out to? I've been trying to get this in front of more people, so far they're always mind blown when they see how the product works
Although I absolutely understand the frustration expressed by the author, I find the notion that SaaS companies are somehow 'evil' because they optimize for the 80/20 rule a bit arrogant. Anyone working in SaaS - or really in any business- understands that you need to prioritize. In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits. And that's absolutely OK.
>In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
Moloch demands babies be scarified to generate maximum profits!
For one, this is a very US concentric way of thinking. Secondly, if a human person thought like this we'd consider them to be an anti-social psychopath, which directly conflicts with the more recent SCOTUS ruling that companies are humans too.
So, yes, we have legally mandated companies be evil. It's been working out well for us in the US as prices skyrocket and any competition is bought up or abused with patents/IP.
[dead]
The right answer is just to have a well documented publicly available API for your customers and eat your own dogfood.
> In the end, your obligation as a company, regardless of your product, is to generate profits.
No denying that. SaaS started with a user problem at the center of it and as they scaled, forgot about an individual user. This only presents the user frustration and a possible solution to it.
> as they scaled, forgot about an individual user
If you're building for individual users you're not going to succeed. We all prioritize for broad success from the beginning.
I'm very into the idea of inversion of control and giving users this flexibility but I agree with GP that the SaaS company critique is misplaced. I hope you find enough success with 100X that you end up coming to the same conclusion.
I'll also add that one of your video examples is essentially a Twitter spam generator; is that the kind of feature you think SaaS companies should be prioritizing?
I created that twitter responder after reading this post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47568028). That wasn't to call out what SaaS companies should prioratise but to show how easy it would be for a user to do it.
SaaS needs to be reinvented. We need backend platforms which provide more security controls, more flexibility in terms of data-sharing, seamless access by AI agents with advanced access controls; e.g. some agents can define schemas, some agents read data, other agents write data, some agents curate data... And custom app frontends can be generated on demand and integrate data from many different sources. This is what I've been working towards with https://saasufy.com/
Enterprise userscripts? Very neat, though I wonder if typical enterprise security policies would allow for this.
Unless the browser locks down devtools you can't you always run userscripts to some extent?
One way to solve it is to partner with the enterprise directly and work within their guardrails
Shameless plug: my company does it, live with Series B companies.
got our extension approved, post which we had no issues.
Solves yesterday's problem. The calcification is UI calcification, and agents don't care about UIs. An MCP server (or a half-decent OpenAPI surface) lets a user-controlled agent compose vendor primitives without touching the DOM, without TOS risk, without overlay maintenance. IoC doesn't get forced by extensions. It gets forced by agents that can read docs and click buttons faster than the vendor can ship features. The vendors who notice will expose that surface voluntarily, because the alternative is getting scraped anyway.
This bothers me. ALL enterprise SaaS prohibits reverse-engineering in its TOS and CSA and most prohibit bots and automation. So, the buyer will need the vendor's explicit permission to use something like 100x; and when the vendor has something on the roadmap, even if it's delayed, there's little chance that the vendor will give this permission. Anybody else bothered by this? Anybody who has a successful workaround?
This is essentially a smarter auto-clicker. I'm not sure I'd call it "reverse engineering".
A TOS/CSA should in no way ever attempt to prohibit automation, and if it does, it (generally) deserves to be disrespected.
There is a legitimate concern however about customer resource use escalating beyond what was expected when the price was set. Luckily this can be written as a simple black and white determination without any complicated gray areas, and is therefore easily enforced both in the code and in the contract.
Talking about dark modes, nytimes still doesn't have an official dark mode (or not I can easily see). This should help.
They have it in the app… grrr
You don't want to ship every feature every user wants, for various reasons that I assume are obvious. Instead make it extensible.
users didnt ask for slow apis either but there they are. I am speaking for the user here and sharing their frustration. Allowing UI modification to fit the user needs should be a default now. The APIs already act as a gaurdrail on what's possible
Configurability in moderation is fine, but go too far and users can hurt each other. JIRA is famous for this: managers customize the life out of it at others' expense.
hence the sharability and subscription. other users need to explicitly subscribe to the page boosters. Else they continue with what they have.
how far it can go ? complete page rewrites ?
* system of records, SOC2, security perimeters, handling concurrency) are real. Migration of data is painful too.*
This is not a moat.
[dead]