alt Hacker NewsI was thinking we should have our own internal saas-pocalypse where I work, or at least threaten one to our vendors.
It used to be that vendors could tie their cost to the value they provide, but now their cost is more correlated to the token spend to reverse engineer and re-implement them (using appropriate clean room controls etc). If their cost goes to far above the AI-driven re-write, they're more likely to get jettisoned (absent some other moat not included purely in the technology).
I'm sure we can all think of products that charge a fair whack in license fees, but would not be massively difficult to re-implement (or at least for the subset of features actually used).
Replies
Many organizations just want to diffuse responsibility away from themselves and will gladly sign a contract to do so. Paying a vendor is infinitely more affordable than the risk of trying to bring a vendors' core competency in-house.
I think the SaaS-pocalypse is going to surface more from new AI-first SaaS companies entering the market and undercutting incumbents in a way that's difficult to compete with.
At the same time we have to value domain experience when it is a cornerstone. Ive worked for "middleman" companies that at face value seem superfluous only to realize we handled relationships or bureaucracies much more effectively then our clients could and thereby provided concrete value well beyond our cost.
Just use a vendor intelligence service to find out what others are paying to cram down what they're trying to charge you. Lots of competitors in this space, you provide them contract details, they provide a report on how and where to push.
On some level, yes, though when I choose a saas product, what I'm really choosing is not a basket of features, but rather someone else to be worrying about scaling, monitoring, security patches, uptime, etc.
Like in theory your agents can build all that too, but all the ancillary bits benefit a lot from being spread across a pool of users with different time zones, release cycles, whatever.