AI is killing B2B SaaS

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Jellyfish is a Jolly Fish, also invertebrate

> how they’re potentially losing an $X00,000 account just because the customer can’t use a specific failure reporting workflow in the SaaS. They’re now working with me to build what the customer needs and retain them.

You mean the poor SaaS company actually now has to implement features needed by customers??

Jesus wept.

One point is now you dont have to pay money to 3rd world countries like mine :(, you can manage with fewer resources inhouse. AI will take care of slop work.

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

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.

Look, software is not going away even though everybody thinks they're a developer now. Do you think companies are going to replace Microsoft Windows, of which there are a billion installs, or Salesforce, Crowdstrike, Quickbooks etc, with some Vibe coded AI slop an intern "coded"?

When enterprises/businesses in general upgrade any software in the company it takes years sometimes... There is also Vendor lock in, you can't just swap things with vibe-coded slop, and trust me your manager will never want to do that either because his butt will be on the line.

for profit software is pretty gross tho. it can be made indefinitely complex, and people can make and sell tools to patchwork the complexity together, but then u need more tools to patchwork all the tools together ...

and u end up in aggregators aggregated aggregators type situation where optimal solutions never arise because we don't actually cooperate enough to produce them

ai is fitting into the notion that this is all bullshit ... even if not in the correct way

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.

Just a single data point, and I‘m not pretending it’s a conclusive one (yet), but I think there is a middle ground between buying a SaaS and vibe coding a replacement: replacing a SaaS with your own solution, using AI coding agents — while actually knowing what you do because creating robust software in-house is already a core competency. No vibe coding needed.

At my company, we build software every day because our business is running a job board.

We always had kind of an impedance mismatch when it comes to creating content pages (think landing pages for marketing).

Yes, we can do this ourselves, but then software engineering resources are in conflict between shipping the next feature and creating landing pages.

So we introduced Webflow. Now marketing could create their content themselves. Did it match our corporate identity? Hopefully. Was it technically sound? Sometimes. Was it fun for software engineers to fix things in Webflow. No.

It kind of worked, but wasn’t exactly ideal.

Meanwhile, software engineering became more and more productive with the advent of AI coding agents, Cursor in our case.

So we tried another approach: giving our content creators Cursor.

But that was brittle, too: Cursor presents an overwhelming complex UI for someone who never used an IDE before, it could do a thousand things while only three are actually needed in this use case, you have to explain git on top of Cursor. It kind of worked, but only kind of.

So we sat down and built https://dx-tooling.org/sitebuilder/

It’s like a hyper-focused „Cursor light“ in the browser, so our content creators can just „chat away“ and create their content pages, with all the guardrails baked into the product. Getting tracking pixel integration etc. right just works. Matching our style guide perfectly just works.

And as a bonus, there is a whole git based storage and versioning workflow underneath, so software engineering can support and test and deploy the results with their preferred tools and methods, but none of this complexity leaks through to the content creators.

We built this ourselves in days, not months, thanks to Cursor, but it’s not vibe-coded — it’s a rock solid application that we will support and improve long-term without headaches: https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp

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.

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.

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

Article is AI slop based on a mostly made up premise.

The survival advice here — 'be a system of record,' 'make switching painful with compliance' — is exactly the playbook that makes customers want to leave in the first place. The deeper question is whether vibe-coded replacements will rot fast enough to send people running back, or whether AI gets good enough to maintain them too.

I'm not one to sell generative AI short at this point, but this seems at odds with the longer-term trend towards more centralized, off-the-shelf solutions, like Shopify, Salesforce, Squarespace, over the "bespoke," in-house alternatives that many companies developed in previous decades. Perhaps AI is making the TCO of "rolling your own" so low that it makes sense to go back to that over SaaS?

There will be an exiting explosion of internal apps and tools and then it will die down as companies get back to business. All those tools and apps will turn into legacy apps and they will eventually try to migrate data off them into some saas platform because its not core to business.

Saas will have to drop prices to be competitive so fat margins will go away which will probably affect margins for AWS etc.

at last, TrueAnon has arrived at hackernews

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.

Time will tell.

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

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.

goooood.

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

Honestly, I'm surprised by how people are pushing back against this idea. I feel like vibe coding is just in its earliest moments of actual viability, and my mind is totally blown by it, and it strikes me that it's exactly what I've always wished software could be. Plastic, flexible, personalized, effective, responsive, organic.

As an anecdote, I've been vibe coding an accounting system that perfectly matches with my own expectations of accounting software, i.e., it's intimately connected to CSVs, imports and exports from CSVs, but acts as a kind of enrichment and reporting and file association layer. If there was anything like this, any kind of SaaS that I could have and download as software and run on my own computer offline and be able to inspect and trust and version control so they wouldn't add or remove some kind of feature that I wanted down the line, then I would have gone with that.

But now I have essentially my absolute ideal solution, written with a Python backend and Vue and JavaScript frontend, and it's radically improved my ability to maintain accounting for our business account.

And I think there's something really important to point out here, which is that the feeling of lock-in is very seriously reduced when you are Vibe coding your own software, because if you don't like the way that it works or you realize that there's something missing, you can add it pretty painlessly. Like, that's always been a huge challenge with choosing vendors for a SaaS platform, is you think, oh no, well, what if their conceptual model for what I'm trying to do doesn't quite map onto our own internal systems or understanding of what's being done? Well, when you have your own Vibe-coded SaaS, you can just add that information. So there's something incredibly organic about it. I used to work at a startup in Redmond where we built this large internal system to manage a scientific process with lots of machinery and data, and it was incredibly empowering and actually became one of the core values of the business that was able to be licensed to other businesses in the same industry. And it seems like we're just improving that capacity from here.

Now obviously, if Vibe Coding magically were to go away or became much more expensive, then I'd have this legacy piece of software, which I couldn't improve, and that would be a dead end. But my expectation is that the functionality that we have today will only improve. And in several years, the scope of changes that I'll be able to make, the level of professionalism, modularization, maintainability, code quality, will only improve. And so this has me thinking in general that software is kind of undergoing a step change where we're moving into the so-called age of intent beyond the age of the interface. And that's tremendously exciting to me, and I just couldn't be more stoked about it.

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.

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.

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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

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