Forcing an inversion of control on the SaaS stack

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.

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!

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.

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/

Talking about dark modes, nytimes still doesn't have an official dark mode (or not I can easily see). This should help.

Enterprise userscripts? Very neat, though I wonder if typical enterprise security policies would allow for this.

You don't want to ship every feature every user wants, for various reasons that I assume are obvious. Instead make it extensible.

how far it can go ? complete page rewrites ?