It's a tale as old as time that developers, particularly junior developers, are convinced they could "slap together something in one weekend" that would replace expensive SAAS software and "just do the parts of it we actually use". Unfortunately, the same arguments against those devs regular-coding a bespoke replacement apply to them vibe-coding a bespoke replacement: management simply doesn't want to be responsible for it. I didn't understand it before I was in management either, but now that I'm in management I 100% get it.

I'd actually say the opposite is the case. B2B (even SaaS) is probably the most robust when it comes to AI resistance. The described "in house vibe coded SaaS replacement" does not mirror my experience in B2B at all. The B2B software mindset I've encountered the most is "We'll pay you so we don't have to wrestle with this and can focus on what we do. We'll pay you even more if we worry even less." which is basically the opposite of...let's have someone inhouse vibe code and push to production. B2B is usually fairly conservative.

1. This isn't rooted in data but anecdotes "One Series E CEO told me that they’re re-evaluating the quarterly renewal of their engineering productivity software because they along with an engineer reimplemented something using Github and Notion APIs. They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3 and they were not going to renew anymore."

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’s cool. I’m building a mob programmer.

> What they don’t know, though, is that a poorly architected system will fail, eventually. As every senior programmer (eventually) understands, our job is complex because we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that.

I have a strong feeling the future's going to look like this:

Company vibe codes to replace a SaaS.

Little do they know this creates a time bomb: fragile systems where fundamental architectural defects are papered over by humans who knew the underlying dynamics but didn't articulate them well enough during the initial "vibe-architecture," so they're forced to patching the "impedance mismatches" with data entry or with even more vibe coding.

Those humans are eventually laid off, because of course they are. Data quality rapidly deteriorates. Operational mishaps deteriorate relationships with human counterparties. Defects begin to cost thousands to millions.

Suddenly, there's demand: not for SaaS, but for actual service businesses. Consultancies that can parachute in, do actual domain-driven design, and un-vibe that code. They do have a stronger-than-ever pool of out-of-work engineers (many from the failed SaaS companies).

The SaaS companies that survive understand that the first S no longer stands for Software; it stands for Solutions.

I see that Software as a Service banked too much on the first S, Software. But really customers want the second S, the Service.

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.

I think one of the interesting things here is that AI doesn't need to be able build B2B SaaS to kill it. So much of the overhead of B2B SaaS companies is thinking about multitenancy, intergrating with many auth providers and mapping those concepts to the program's user system, juggling 100 features when any given customer only needs 10 of them, creating PLG upsell flows to optimize conversions, instrumenting A/B tests etc...

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.

I don't think it is killing SaaS. I have definitely had to extend my sales cycle when a potential customer vibe-coded a quick fix for a pain point that might have triggered a sale a few weeks earlier, but eventually the benefit delivered by someone else caring about the software as their entire mission really wins out over a feature here and there.

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.

"For example, to create a data visualization I won’t seek any SaaS. I’ll just code one myself using many of the popular vibe coding tools (my team actually did that and it’s vastly more flexible than what we’d get off-the-shelf)."

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.

There is no evidence presented that internally "vibe coded" products are the reason hubspot et al are struggling right now. If anything, the fact that the divergence from the broader index starts in April of last year (well before the current vibe coding moment got going) is evidence that this is something else.

Sure its fun to (vibe) code some internal version for a SaaS, but maintain it month after month? Maintain SLAs, etc? That's not fun.

Vibe coding gives you that dopamine hit of creation, but does the internal dev really want to deal with the care and feeding of the random shitty timesheet app they created?

Do they want to take on the work of integrating random backend systems that timesheet system needs to talk to? Do they want to get called at 3AM when it's down?

Even AI assisted, living year after year with production systems is hard.

> How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every customer feels they can get something better built with vibe-coded AI products?

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.

I don't really agree with this.

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.

I think there may be other factors killing SaaS, particularly data sovereignty.

"According to IDC’s Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey from June 2025, 45% of all organizations and 56% of “digital natives” cited data sovereignty and potential cloud changes as their greatest concern for 2026."

https://www.veeam.com/blog/saas-data-sovereignty-microsoft-3...

Maybe it's mostly from AI, maybe it's mostly general economic cutbacks. I also feel like these "wrapper" style SaaS products are the first ones companies are dropping when they are looking to cut costs, and I think a lot of companies are looking to cut costs. I do agree with the overall conclusion either way, that System of Record products/companies are the most likely to survive. There are a lot of SaaS companies with questionable long-term businesses who are getting hit, but that was bound to happen.

SaaS dying is mostly nonsense.

Which is easier to vibecode - AI agent or Salesforce?

The fragmentation in the AI agent space will be markedly larger than at the base CRM layer.

Abd the AI agent is replaceable in under a minute but your data in Salesforce isn’t.

This isn't happening. The past six months has been rough on public B2B SaaS valuations, but the impact is a lot wider than just B2B SaaS (its all non-S&P10 software), and valuations are just vibes in the end. Most of these companies are, financially, doing pretty well; seeing key metric growth, including revenue and profit. This makes sense: AI does not fundamentally change the bargain SaaS brought to the table, that companies would rather pay someone to solve their problems than solve them themselves. However, the stock market doesn't care about this. The stock market doesn't care about anything; it behaves irrationally and non-sensically, and trying to derive any sense of how stable, strong, or successful a company is from stock market valuation is like using lines of code to claim that a software project is really good.

been thinking about this too. the middleware layer is getting decimated first

It's not and I really doubt it will, for true SaaS platforms. A desktop .gif recorder (frequent example I've read about) is not a SaaS, even if you charge monthly for it.

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.

This feels a lot like the old RPA hype cycle to me — more sales narrative than structural change.

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.

Lot of places that I see AI disrupting - I'm not buying that SaaS is going to be a significant one.

Reading through the article:

> They were paying $30,000 to a popular tool3

Couple things we needed to understand here:

  - How large is the client company
  - Is that $30,000/month or day or hour....

If it's a technology company of > 1000 employees - then $30,000 month doesn't even get Finance's attention. And there is next to zero chance that anyone is going to vibe-code, deploy, support and run anything in a 1000 person+ company for $30,000 a month. SaaS wins hands down.

Any product/service that people care about comes with a pager rotation - which is 6-7 employees making > $200k/year. If you can offload that responsibility to a SaaS for < $1mmm/year - done deal.

I think opensource is a good analogue here. For many SaaS products, you don't even need to vibecode anything - there is already a reasonable OSS alternative. Yet people still pay for the SaaS. They want support, maintainability, security, edemifcation, a throat to choke, regulation and domain expertise, etc.

I do think like this HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46847690) is a good example of where a custom more domain specific solution makes a lot more sense that dropping in an off-the-shelf ERP. Still though, I think the bakery would prefer to buy the bakery-ERP than build it but vibecoding does reduce the barrier to entry so we might see more competition and share taking from incumbents by domain-specialized new entrants.

The real story isn't that some enterprise mega corp is going to vibe-code their own Workday.

The real story is that SOME startups made up of one person (or small number of engineers) will do it, and create pricing pressures against Workday, or DocuSign, or other B2B SaaS.

> AI is killing B2B SaaS

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).

> we have to understand the relationships in the real world, the processes involved, and the workflows needed, and representing it in a robust way to create a stable system. AI can’t do that.

That is because AI is living in our world, instead of the opposite where we live in AI's world.

Case in point: maybe the AI hallucinated a class method that never existed in our world yet, but perhaps in the AI led processes and workflows it would be written to better fit into the smooth gradient decent those same top parameters' scores.

It's this generation's "build vs buy." I imagine it will play out the same way, like a revolving door. Customers churn because they can "build it themselves," then a year later when they're sick of maintaining a mess of code for some internal system instead of delivering value to their own customers, they come back. A blip.

It’s not as far-fetched as people think. I see so many comments here doubting you can vibe code a full CRM or e-commerce SaaS, but a skilled AI-assisted programmer absolutely can, especially if they're aware of strong open-source alternatives already out there.

For Salesforce-like CRM, there's Twenty[0], a good-enough alternative. For Shopify-style e-commerce, Medusa[1] is a headless commerce platform.

The real power comes from using AI to study how these projects implement specific features (payments, inventory, customer dashboards, etc.) and adapt them to your stack. AI excels at finding the "seams" (those connection points where a feature ties into the tech stack) and grasping the full implementation. The trick is knowing precisely where the feature lives in the code (files, functions, modules), because AIs often miss scattered pieces otherwise. That's what I'm building at opensource.builders[2]: turning OSS repos into a modular cookbook with structured "skills" that point to exact details for reliable remixing and porting.

SaaS companies are forever beholden to raising their market cap, even in solved spaces like cart, payment processing, and CRMs. Most businesses run on CRUD apps anyway, and if your core app exposes an API, you can build any customization you need on top of it. People here discounting how valuable it is for a business to have the software that runs their business on a tech stack they understand and something they truly own.

[0] https://github.com/twentyhq/twenty

[1] https://github.com/medusajs/medusa

[2] https://opensource.builders

I don't see that happening because companies need to concentrate on their differentiators. Is your enterprise vibe coding its own SaaS? Who's taking care of it?

Here is the list of evidence the author gives for why AI is the reason software company stocks are down:

While the author is wildly overstating things, I do think AI is striking at the heart of the SaaS problem, which is the business model of "pay us $10-100+ per employee per month in perpetuity or we will hold all your data and your company's operations hostage". There is always going to be value in good software, but it is shitty vendors relying on the lock-in effect that are in danger. And good riddance.

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.

I am kind of hoping that AI will kill the startup grab for money TBH. Too many wannabe CEOs I've met in the past 2 decades have gotten rich thanks to a lucky pitch without a clear path to a viable product. At least 6 of those I know did so at the expense of developers that accepted equity over cash...and the developers wasted a ton of time and 2 even were briefly homeless as a result...and none of them live in California.

Hopefully wannabe senior leadership will try and take advantage of AI without taking advantage of developers, because most of us just want to write code and build something great.

Focus is a currency and you have a limited amount of it, if all SaaS is built internally, teams would go bankrupt. There's likely always going to be a band of experts focused on solving a problem and everyone pays them to solve it for them, because they do it better and can handle the hassle of maintaining it.

Boy that "st" ligature in the subheading font is eye-catching, to the point of distraction.

I was reading through the article and waiting for the key info to drop, but nope. It never did. It seemed like marketing fluff. If anything, vibe coding may eliminate some of the B2C SaaSes, but not B2B. If you think an enterprise is going to vibe code a B2B offering that they pay millions for, you're out of your mind.

Here's my general mantra regarding AI: NEVER take suggestions about AI from people who have a vested interest in it. CEOs of companies that train and offer LLMs, Authors of Books about LLMs and AI in general, etc.

This may come off as an unpopular opinion, but this is how I felt after listening to Steve Yegge recently. He has a new book about Vibe coding and he goes on in the interview/podcast to say that the best programmers he knows in the world (the ones better than him and maybe even the top world class programmers), would be equivalent to those of interns in an year, if they don't start vibe coding or use AI. I respect the guy, but damn, this is just peak delusion. He didn't even say it as a hyperbole, he meant it.

According to popular CEOs of companies training LLMs, 2024 was supposed to be the year that would eliminate the need for Junior and mid-level engineers. 2025 happened. Now, we are in 2026.

So yeah, I'm never taking advice about AI from these people ever again.

I predict the fallout from this is companies being nickel & dimed to death by a million smaller subscriptions (rather than just cutting a huge check to Workday, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle or similar). There is such a glut of AI ISV startups that are filling highly specific niches, and some are quite good, but they're all usually in the $10-50/mo/user. Gets to be big numbers pretty quickly in a large enterprise.

Wow, the tails on the lowercase letter 't' throughout that article are distracting.

One problem with centrally produced and distributed software is that a small subset of users demanding certain features results in feature bloat for everyone. Costs for all features are shared by all users.

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.

AI, as do most things, help the big players get bigger. If someone is automating small parts of the b2b layer they get dropped, but it’s harder to drop an automation that companies are used to. I don’t see how AI is changing that, companies spent a lot of time and money to set up the automation because it’s needed and because they can write a potential replacement cheaply doesn’t mean they are going to rip away something that works and is reliable.

“Killing” is a bit strong, but is there a world where folks just vibe code solutions that they would have bought previously? Absolutely and and I think that world is here now.

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.

Saas companies will survive for the same reason they do today. The operational overhead of any sufficiently complicated piece of software is too much, even more so if it's vibe coded.

The framing of 'vibe coding replaces SaaS' misses the more interesting shift: the value SaaS provided was never really the software — it was workflow automation. Software was just the best delivery mechanism we had.

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).

Build infra heavy saas. Somehow can get through. Llm will get better only, and people start copying every sucessfull platforms.

I just don't buy it.

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.

Reminds me of the story of when the Surgeon General (in the US) reported that smoking causes cancer.

People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later.

I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just like how many less people smoke today than in the past, the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point someone will figure out how to replace SaS with AI; it's just going to take a lot longer than many think.

The problem is never building, it's maintenance. SaaS isn't going anywhere.

With a new agentic-lashup tearing across the internet every week, pointing the way to "gradient descent" software development, any purchasing manager worth their salt is going to ask some serious questions about their enormous SaaS bill before committing to another expensive long term contract. It follows that valuations must decline. Even if only because risks to moats have increased, but also because it makes sense to negotiate hard on pricing when there's fear in your counterparty.

As a founder, there is another angle here that is worth mentioning. Not only does AI B2B SaaS allow insourcing, it also allows there to be 10x (imaginary number) the number of companies building SaaS for the same use case. What we see in healthcare or finance for example is executive fatigue from demos, in many cases mostly vibe coded frontend UIs that entrepreneurs are using to test the market. This creates friction for businesses / SaaS companies that are unable to show how their solution is unique, well built or has a clear moat over the many others they have seen.

It is obvious.

A middle 100-500 heads firm don't need enterprise level SaaS, a vibe coded website will suit them better.

Fundamentally, those workflow/orchestration SaaS needs to answer the question why people should pay you premium while only getting 80% where they want to be.

I think people here need to accept that software is becoming electricity, you get charged when you use it and by how much. You don't pay for a box shaped electricity or purple color electricity, it is just electricity.

AI isn't killing SaaS exactly, but instead of selling UIs, SaaS companies are going to have to focus on infrastructure and data. You have to host stuff somewhere, so there's an inescapable cost and transaction that has to take place. If businesses can pay one bill for infra + data management and get nice apps and stuff on top of that (without being locked in), that makes more sense than trying to roll stuff together even if you have a platform team.

I can see three forms of competition here:

- 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.

Not sure about that, however agents in low code tools are certainly taking over old school integrations.

there is no saas downturn caused by AI. wall street is just starting to say hang on a minute, why is this SaaS stock trading at a price to earnings ratio of 300?

then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out

of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again

you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders

in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything

The reason for divergence is actually much simpler. NASDAQ 100 includes data center builders, Morgan Stanley software index doesn't. Stock market is going down across the board if you exclude data center construction.

Remember when businesses ran on cobbled together access databases and vb? It was easier than building something ny prompting an llm.I made a good living just rewriting those things for them when they fell apart.

I would assume one major thing here is that many orgs only need a small subset of functionality from what most products provide. Many times, that small subset of functionality is only "good enough" in and of itself, but the org is paying the premium for the entire suite of whatever it is. This makes realizing that an LLM can get them to MVP and beyond much easier.

Charging hundreds of thousands if not millions per year for very basic functionality is what is "killing" b2b SaaS.

Anybody who says this doesn't understand build vs buy, and why companies buy in the first place, or they'll selling AI.

Well it definitely killed mine so I can't say this is not true

Sure, vibe coding has impacted user's expectations. They know you can ship a new update easier and faster than before - and you actually can.

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.

> build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales.

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

For the most part, you can replicate any B2B SaaS product in a spreadsheet. The same reasons why spreadsheets didn't kill B2B SaaS apply to "in house vibe coded SaaS replacements." The original in house apps are (and continue to be) spreadsheets.

here's the secret saas can vibe code features too on top of their paid well developed and secured api. they can get off their ass and vibe code a mcp wrapper, so user can use the ai tooling they pay for to interact with their saas. and they'd be called visionary hero of the agentic revolution.

but they don't want to. and they will be replaced, as it's good and well.

Maybe things will finally go full circle and people/companies will restart self-hosting their infrastructure instead of farming out everything.

Something notable for SaaS which this article doesn't mention is that in some cases the reason to buy rather than make yourself is due to needing to handle a bunch of different regulations which LLMs don't threaten (barring businesses which would rather have lawsuits than pay for a SaaS).

The trick is to build stuff that is hard to vibe code

Maybe the new SaaS is to build vibe coding (aka conversation) into whatever you’re offering.

AI isn't killing B2B SaaS. It's killing the service economy. Perhaps, the correct term, technically, is just shrinking it to very very small fraction.

Be a System of Record, not just a Wrapper™ is excellent advice.

"The SaaS model was built on a simple premise: we build it once, you pay forever."

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.

Anyone can learn to cook, and the barrier to entry is low. There's no shortage of restaurants though.

At the end of the day you do not need to replace your B2B SaaS with AI.

You need your B2B SaaS to think you can use AI to replace it though, so said SaaS will keep it's prices reasonable. Otherwise they have you by the balls and will charge you much as humanly possible.

A link shortener is such an easy thing to code, it's essentially one database table with a redirect. To add to that, there are many open source libraries to implement link shortening, including analytics and stuff. Even then Bitly and Rebrandly have customers (from their website) like Toyota, Cisco, Oracle, Monday.com, New York Times, 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"

Until Claude Code comes with indemnity insurance for HIPAA / GDPR / etc… B2B SaaS is here to stay. You want me to convince my auditor that the vibe-coded in house software handles PII correctly?

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

no. High interest rates and a cautionary view of future economic growth are killing B2B SaaS. Money is no longer free, and so there is a bigger push for cost-cutting rather than growing your buisness with free money.

I don't think AI is killing B2B SaaS so much as companies are finally reckoning with the immense costs of SaaS in a markably different environment than when SaaS exploded in popularity, and AI offers an off-ramp to some. Let's break it down camp-by-camp to show you what I mean:

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.

if you're a software company and all your clients are in tech...you're gonna have a bad time. godspeed.

No.. just.. no. This will be a thing for like 1, maybe 2 years, then people will realise it doesn’t make sense to spend $50K of time per annum to replace a $500/month subscription for a better product.

I've worked in SaaS for most of my career, only recently working at a big corp who is largely the buyer and user of SaaS tools to meet their objectives. From the perspective of the corp business buyer, they want something that works for their needs and they want to buy something instead of build it because the support costs are gnarly. They already have engineers dedicated to the tools they've purchased. Much better to put the risk on someone else they can yell at. And the permissions and access to these tools, reports, data, is usually its own special problem to manage. Building a lot of one-off tools is going to just give IT a huge headache and they will push the org to buy before vibe coding a solution.

I know this is petty but I stopped reading when I saw the “c-t” ligature in the article headings. Obnoxious and pretentious.

If that would be true, expect in the next decade a frantic search for seclusive grey beards, those who haven't given up their rituals and ancient languages.

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.

at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews

It seems like 'the market' is making this bet. I'm not deep into financial reports or whatever. But what I'm seeing from the tech side, this is not at all true.

If anything B2B SaaS is growing with AI, and it hasn't even begun, the biggest AI markets right now are personal. The B2B market is up for grabs for sure, 0%-1% of niches have an LLM product right now. But traditional SaaS has a huge advantage, they have reams of industry specific data, and they have the customers, sure they will have competition, but they are the incumbents.

If I had any money I'd buy the dip

the procurement bypass was the best part. now watching ai devs ship faster than our salesforce admin could configure flows

Time will tell.

Vibe coding seems to be the iPhone camera to DSLR moment for programming.

- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.

- Professional scoffed at it as a toy

- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.

The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.

Just because it's possible to build equivalent software by vibe coding doesn't necessarily mean that companies will stop using SaaS. There are multiple reasons why...

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.

Maybe the type of SaaS that's akin to stock media (photos, video, music). Just hard enough to do from scratch, but not important enough that it needs to be exceptional in it's field. I've made some money off software like that, and it was nice, but I always knew it couldn't last. Better developers took most of it from me years ago.

I used to be a big advocate for Salesforce in my organization. And it was really great .. allowing us to deliver new functionality without the usual IT procurement bureaucracy.

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.

Are B2B sales actually impacted or is the stock market just randomly predicting AI will impact B2B and selling off?

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

I didn't realize B2B SaaS products were in freefall like his numbers suggest. I'm not convinced customers are leaving to vibe code their own products but I do believe we're seeing a major shift in the market, pushed by the sudden relative ease of coding. There are a lot of B2B SaaS products which are outdated and I wouldn't be surprised if they're supplanted by much faster competition

“Software is eating the world” and “AI is eating software”

No it isn’t. Writing the code was never the issue with making software, it was designing it.

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.

I disliked how SaaS CEO's were decrying the death of engineers. Their coordinated layoffs over the past years or so was excruciating to watch and experience. Their language was aggressive and inflammatory.

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.

Having worked in enterprise B2B SaaS for a long time, almost every feature I built could have been a simple spreadsheet or some emails. So I'm highly skeptical AI is going to change anything.

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.

This immediately lost credibility for me with this quote:

> 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