We've seen hackathons where attendees build a SaaS business in a weekend. More than just Startup Weekend validation and a shitty MVP. A pretty-much complete SaaS product. It's a step change.

But this means the market for SaaS products is going to get hit hugely. If you can vibecode up a specific service for your specific requirement in a few days, why bother buying a SaaS product?

And, of course, if you can build a me-too SaaS product that imitates a successful competitor over a weekend, and then price it at 10% of their price, that's going to hit business models.

I think the SaaS startup gravy train is definitely over and done.

Personally, my sense is that there's a lot left to do in batteries + motors + LLMs. The drones in Ukraine could be smarter. Robot companions that can hold a conversation. Voice interfaces for robots generally [0]. Unfortunately, the people making all the batteries, motors, and increasingly the LLMs, are in China. So those of us stuck with idiot governments protecting their fossil-fuel donors are going to miss out on it.

[0] the sketch of two scots in a voice-controlled lift still resonates, though. There's probably still work to do here.

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atomicnumber3 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The value in SaaS was never the code, it was the focus on the problem space, the execution, and the ops-included side.

AI makes code "free" as in "free puppy".

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hn_throwaway_99 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Sometimes, but I think there are some SaaS products whose business model is really under threat. Look at PagerDuty. Their PE ratio is like 4.4. They have a lot of existing customers but virtually no pricing power now and I imagine getting new business for them is extremely difficult.

	▲	marcus_holmes 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Canva is my go-to example - you can just get NanoBanana/whatever to generate and iterate on the image. Same for all those stock photo services. I used to use them a lot, now I just generate blog images

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marcus_holmes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, agreed, but it was at least part of the moat. Competitors can see the model, the approach to market, etc. They still had to code up a better product.

And part of the problem that the SaaS solves is that "I have this thing that I need to do. I can probably do it in software, but I don't know how. Can I buy that software?". Which is now becoming "Can I get an LLM to do it?" instead.

	▲	otterley 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		That’s where the “free as in puppy” comes in. It’s still a classic case of build vs buy, except building is now quicker than it used to be. You still have to ask, “suppose I did build it myself. Then what?”

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heathrow83829 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The biggest limiting factor is user acquisition. Just because you can build a competitor in a weekend doesn't mean you can easily acquire a user base. it's dam hard to get users even if your product is twice as good and your giving it away for free!

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Marsymars an hour ago | parent [-]

The implied risk isn't more SaaS competitors, it's that B2B SaaS consumers will just code up their own product instead of going with a SaaS vendor.

	▲	marcus_holmes an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Started seeing even B2C folks just get the LLM to do it, or code up a quick solution that does most of it.