> It is happening though internally in businesses I've worked with

How many samples do you have?

Which industries are they from?

Which SaaS products were they using, exactly and which features?

> ...a company I know recently got told their v1 API they relied on on some back office SaaS tool was being deprecated. V2 of the API didn't have the same features ... dev spends a week or two rebuilding that tool

Was that SaaS the equivalent of the left-pad Node.js module?

I'm not the OP, but I do have an annectote.

We've got an backend pipeline that does image processing. At every step of the pipeline, it would make copies of small (less than 10MB) files from an S3 storage source, do a task, then copy the results back up to the storage source.

Originally, it was using AWS but years ago it was decided that AWS was not cost effective so we turned to another partner OVH and Backblaze.

Unfortunately, the reliability and throughput of both of them isn't as consistent as AWS and this has been a constant headache.

We were going to go back to AWS or find a new partner, but I nominated we use NFS. So we build nothing, pay nothing, get POSIX semantics back, and speed has gone up 3x. At peak, we only copy 40GB of files per day, so it was never really necessary to use S3 except that our servers were distributed and that was the only way anyone previously could think to give each server the same storage source.

While this isn't exactly what the OP and you are talking about, I think it illustrates a fact: SaaS software was seen as the hammer to all nails, giving you solutions and externalizing problems and accountability.

Now that either the industry has matured, building in-house is easier, or cost centers need to be reduced, SaaS is going be re-evaluated under the context of 'do we really need it'?

I think the answer to many people is going to be no, you don't need enterprise level solutions at all levels of your company, especially if you're not anywhere near the Fortune 1000.

I'm a consultant so I see lots of businesses, it's happening in all of them. I'm not seeing people rip out tools for custom builds to be clear, I just see people solving today problems with custom apps.

Lots of companies make good money selling the equivalent of leftpad for confluence or jira. Anecdotally, that's exactly the kind of stuff that gets replaced with homegrown AI-built solutions at our company

I helped a company that is build averse move off of Fivetran to Debezium and some of their own internal tooling for the same workload they are paying 40k less a month (yeah they just raised their prices again).

Now, that's not exactly the same thing, but their paucity of skills made them terrified to do something like this before, they had little confidence they could pull it off and their exec team would just scoff and tell them to work on other revenue generating activities.

Now the confidence of Claude is hard to shake off of them which is not exactly the way I wanted the pendulum to swing, but its almost 500k yearly back in their pockets.