SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before.
My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations.
I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.
A lot of this is a massive stretch. It's majority self-hosted which the average person is not going to deal with.
Some of the "alternatives" aren't even close. All but one of the Spotify/Apple Music replacements are self-hosted things where the user needs to provide the audio files. That's nothing like the near-infinite jukebox experience that Spotify and such offer. The only one that isn't self-hosted/BYOM is basically just an app-only (no web) front end for YT music and few obscure other players.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of self-hosting but there’s a reason we don’t manage and run our own email infrastructure.
I think the SaaS is dead meme is really just a “SaaS can’t be lazy anymore”. The days of offering a product that technically does something, but is incredibly poorly designed, or not well integrated, or unsupported — are over.
If your SaaS doesn’t support both Google and Microsoft; macOS and Windows; iOS and Android; automated provisioning, complex/fine-grained RBAC, customisable onboarding.. You’re dead in the water.
The moat of features has evaporated, and your only defence is good UX, stability and TCO.
AI isn’t eating SaaS. It’s eating shitty businesses.
Password Manager SaaS that have been breached are dead.
Auth providers that scale their pricing model to their investors growth expectations are dead.
Platforms and technical products that did something a script could do, with little support for real business software, ecosystems and environments are dead.
> AI isn’t eating SaaS. It’s eating shitty businesses.
AI isn't even eating most shitty SaaS businesses, because it's a weird HN fantasy that your hairdresser or car mechanic are itching to manage agent swarms and risk losing their business if that unnecessary adventure goes sideways. They would much rather pay several hundred bucks for a SaaS product that has a bunch of UI annoyances.
It's likely that there will be an explosion in vibecoded competitors to existing SaaS products, but I wouldn't underestimate the importance of familiarity and stability. I use a bunch of SaaS stuff for my business and it's not like I do a weekly comparative analysis to see if switching to some unfamiliar platform that popped up overnight could save me a bit of money or time. It's just not worth it.
This. Even if you vibecode stuff and outsource most of the decision making to an LLM, the software has to be maintained over an extended period. Not to mention that running the agent also takes money. And if any of the dependencies (including the LLM itself) goes down and you have no idea how the whole system works, you're cooked.
SaaS alone was never much of a moat. SaaS plus consulting is still very much alive. Perhaps more than ever before.
My client's customers are not paying for the software. They are paying for a complete solution that results in compliant operations.
I don't pay for Spotify because I need a way to listen to music. If it was just about music playback I'd use foobar and get into torrents again. I pay for Spotify because they curate a massive collection and provide many ways to discover new experiences.
A lot of this is a massive stretch. It's majority self-hosted which the average person is not going to deal with.
Some of the "alternatives" aren't even close. All but one of the Spotify/Apple Music replacements are self-hosted things where the user needs to provide the audio files. That's nothing like the near-infinite jukebox experience that Spotify and such offer. The only one that isn't self-hosted/BYOM is basically just an app-only (no web) front end for YT music and few obscure other players.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of self-hosting but there’s a reason we don’t manage and run our own email infrastructure.
I think the SaaS is dead meme is really just a “SaaS can’t be lazy anymore”. The days of offering a product that technically does something, but is incredibly poorly designed, or not well integrated, or unsupported — are over.
If your SaaS doesn’t support both Google and Microsoft; macOS and Windows; iOS and Android; automated provisioning, complex/fine-grained RBAC, customisable onboarding.. You’re dead in the water.
The moat of features has evaporated, and your only defence is good UX, stability and TCO.
AI isn’t eating SaaS. It’s eating shitty businesses.
Password Manager SaaS that have been breached are dead.
Auth providers that scale their pricing model to their investors growth expectations are dead.
Platforms and technical products that did something a script could do, with little support for real business software, ecosystems and environments are dead.
isn't the premise that larger saas companies are being replaced by in-house solutions and by more and smaller players cannibalizing each other?
> AI isn’t eating SaaS. It’s eating shitty businesses.
AI isn't even eating most shitty SaaS businesses, because it's a weird HN fantasy that your hairdresser or car mechanic are itching to manage agent swarms and risk losing their business if that unnecessary adventure goes sideways. They would much rather pay several hundred bucks for a SaaS product that has a bunch of UI annoyances.
It's likely that there will be an explosion in vibecoded competitors to existing SaaS products, but I wouldn't underestimate the importance of familiarity and stability. I use a bunch of SaaS stuff for my business and it's not like I do a weekly comparative analysis to see if switching to some unfamiliar platform that popped up overnight could save me a bit of money or time. It's just not worth it.
This. Even if you vibecode stuff and outsource most of the decision making to an LLM, the software has to be maintained over an extended period. Not to mention that running the agent also takes money. And if any of the dependencies (including the LLM itself) goes down and you have no idea how the whole system works, you're cooked.
Good format and hook.
1999-2026