alt Hacker NewsThe common question I get asked about building my SaaS: "What's to stop customers from making their own?"
Sure, if you want to put an equal amount of time into what I've built, be on the hook for maintaining the infra, probably diverge from what will end up being a stable spec, go for it. It won't be as good, it won't be as fast, you will be fighting Claude at every corner just like I did to build the right thing. But consider this: people still pay for Dockerhub even though anyone can spin up any number of open source registries. SaaS is no where near doomed, people will always pay to not have distractions from their actual core business cases.
It’s not equal amount of time though.
You don’t need to support all the other customers, and you also have the exact apis and their usage.
Telling Claude to “reimplement” something is vastly more achievable than trying to spec and research and develop a totally novel idea.
And it gets much worse for the “open core” projects - you can literally get the core and vibe code all the “premium” features and don’t pay the original creators a dime … while still requiring a lot of skill to do, it is vastly more tractable than it used to be, shifting the “is it worth the time and money” point quite a lot.
My prediction is we will see a lot less open source or open core companies in the future, people are now guarding their IP much more.
Ahh, it was nice while it lasted. I’m already thinking how I will be telling my grandkids about the good old time of GitHub and open source and oss social interactions, while stroking my white beard…