alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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I agree with you. In B2B SaaS you don't sell the software, you sell your expertise in a specific domain and the responsability you take for owning that expertise. The fact that the development costs are nearly zero will make them more valuable and more protifable
B2B is a large corp is like you describe, but it's very different in SMBs, and there are many, many more SMBs.
Maybe you are right and the companies do want to pay and not worry about these problems. But now they have a lot more SaaS options to chose from. The incumbent companies like Salesforce and Atlassian have less of a moat. Maybe they'll keep the power users but if a customer is only using 80% of the feature set there is new competition. Competition might come in the form of a startup but it can also come from existing SaaS companies expanding into adjacent domains. Canva now does docs. Notion does email. etc
For big corporations at least prices of SaaS are rarely an issue. Issues are: we don’t have the time to introduce a new tool, what about our processes, we don’t have the right people.
I'm considering SaaS replacements with in house code in situations where my general thoughts are "how can this possibly be the pricing for this?" which is not uncommon.
So how much Constellation Software stock are you buying since the market seems to think they are dead in the water after a 50% drawdown?
I, on the other hand, can't wait to fire every single B2B subscription we've got.
B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.
I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.
Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.
I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.
If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
hard disagree, several b2b categories are going extinct because AI just completely replaced them.
I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
how dont people understand? if you have a VC funded b2b saas, you need to charge huge margins for the investors to get a return. now, small teams can vibe code a replacement and charge 90% less money. AI is going to kill saas margins.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
The reality is anyone generate useful code with an AI agent now. Dores in accounting can now automate all her spreadsheets in a single afternoon.
Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
Reminds me of a blog post a while back saying that gigabit fiber at home would lead to everyone running their own email server.