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.

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monero-xmr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well before vibe coding, tons of open source software existed (and exists) to replace SaaS. With lots of features and knobs and real communities. But I still often pay for SaaS because managing it is a headache. Some human has to do it. I can pay the human or I can pay the company. I really don’t see how vibe coded toys can replace real battle tested SaaS products. A better explanation is the bubble in PE ratio is deflating and it’s happening all over, regressing to the mean. AI is a convenient explanation for everything

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echelon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

How many SaaS companies are public? How is that bubble deflating?

These are real risks to these companies.

Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.

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falloutx 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.

Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous.

If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma

	▲	echelon 41 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, for that example there's even less to do: you just put your employees directly on Nano Banana or one of the simple Nano Banana wrappers. If you need rich outputs, there are tools for that now too. Let me put it another way - would you want to be Adobe or Figma right now? And applied to the original point, would you feel comfortable being a SaaS company right now?

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monero-xmr 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Now you have an entire in-house product to manage and build features on. It could potentially work but so much of what my company pays for is about much more than the software itself. One example would be BrowserStack for very specific browser and mobile app testing edge cases. Can’t vibe code this. Another would be a VPN service with the maximum number of locations to test how our system behaves when accessing from those locations. Another would be hosted git. Another is google suite and all of its apps. How can we vibe code Google Docs and Sheets and Drive and all of the integrations and tooling? It simply isn’t going to happen.