alt Hacker NewsConfiguration as a Service companies must be a having a tough time these days...
I couldnt imagine a lot of teams are debating anymore whether to build their own or use an off the shelf product like this. The former being a straight forward task for an LLM. And the latter being a point of failure/attack for any one want to mess with the core foundations of a product.
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I build a B2B SaaS. I ran the same PDF through my product and a general-purpose AI. Both had zero number errors, and the AI's design was good enough. So I don't expect people to pay for the output. I think what's left is what happens after: who opened it, inquiries, spec changes, and team collaboration.
At a certain scale (probably bimodal distribution) it makes sense to have a provider you can shrug it off to and point the finger to when things are missing features or the system goes down, etc etc. On the big-co end of that spectrum I think you are right and AI makes this stuff easy to launch internally.
The owner at my current gig has multiple times said "software is over" as it being a sort of gravy train of rent seeking. Products are gonna have to offer real / significant value to attract new customers. Maybe even to keep them, too...
You miss where the value of software is nowadays. Just the hosting of this thing is worse to pay for.
Analytics, documentation, configuration, etc saas companies must be having the same hard time.
Companies as well as people are still happy to pay for the second S in SaaS.
Building something, updating it, running it, testing etc. still requires resources and attention. One example for this would be taxis. You pay for the comfort of not having to drive the car, do maintenance, take into account road works, cleaning, etc. and not because you couldn't drive a car yourself. That time you can use instead to focus on your actual business.