alt Hacker NewsI wonder how long until Claude/OpenAI eat a lot of the current AI/Agent SaaS's lunch.
Originally I thought they would stick towards being a model provider mainly, but with all the recent releases it seems they do want to provide more "services."
Wonder what part of the market 3rd party apps will build a moat around?
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Probably never. There are a couple reasons:
1. We pay for saas, so we don't have to manage it. If you vibe-code or use these AI things, then you are managing it yourself.
2. Most Saas is like $20-$100/month/person for most Saas. For a software engineer, that maybe <1h of pay.
3. Most Saas require some sort of human in the loop to check for quality (at least sampling). No users would want to do that.
Number 2 is the biggest reason. It's $20 a month.... I'm not gonna replace that with anything.
Writing this message already costs more than $20 of my time.
I predict that the market will get bigger because people are more prone to automate the long-tail/last-mile stuff since they are able to
I cloned a product today that does the 20% of a product my client needed. It took 8 hours and will save my client 2k a month in licensing fees. Plus, I can now add the features they were missing in the original product.
There's a lot of money to be made in small business automation right now.