Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call? What's the real value here? Quick money grab and wait for copies? Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?

I've been struggling with that.

I built https://gallotails.com/ because I am a cocktail enthusiast. First commit, March 6th 2019. One of the features I am proud is which cocktails you can build based on your ingredients, and I was smart, the bar ignores garnishes and can suggest cocktails you're one ingredient away. But you have to add the ingredients. And interpret the bar screen.

And here's what I did with ChatGPT a few days ago: https://chatgpt.com/share/6ab59877-4b74-83e8-8da5-966d9f3a38...

Clicked the microphone icon and rambled for a few seconds (could have just taken a picture too I guess). Nudged ChatGPT to only give me simple cocktails I can stir instead of using a mixer. Said I could buy a lime, sure. Then asked how to keep the ginger beer fresh.

There is NO WAY I can code all of that in my little gallotails.com - a single chat window has entirely replaced my site. And that's my pet little project I do it on weekends, mostly to keep my tech skills sharp. I can only imagine what the biggest cocktails website, actual companies, are going / will go through once more and more people just realize the chat tab is enough. And I am not talking about purely content, ChatGPT can do everything my site does, and more, into any direction, in an instant.

Which left me with the question, then what should my site be? Community? To be taken over by agents?

Currently munching on what sites like mine should do, and what they should be.

Many of us have the exact same thought process. Related: I have heard indie game developers have stopped the traditional practice of updating a dev log as a form of marketing and community building because people will point their LLm at it and create your own game before you do

> Like many of us, I've been hobbying away on some SaaS that wraps an LLM. But I often worry, isn't this just adding buttons to an LLM call?

> That's why I created isitsaas.io: your platform for determining whether your llm wrapper has product potential, or whether people would rather just use claude directly instead. Simply pop in your business idea, and our award winning, proprietary technology will ask claude if you can make money off of it.

> Trial memberships start at $10/month

Here’s an easy proxy: Did you feel the need to build it because nothing to your liking existed? Did it take some effort to build? Do others feel the need to use your thing for those reasons?

Then it’s sufficiently non-obvious. I believe there’s still a pretty big field of things that fall into this category. Making proper things is a lot more than writing some code.

I suspect publishing an MCP server that provides access to an interesting resource is a better move.

You can also host a chat interface that connects to said MCP server as a convenience. But serious users probably already have their own inference and it's already hooked into other resources as well.

I don't think "is my SaaS better than others" is the important question, instead "is SaaS going to be valuable in a cheap bespoke software future".

I've been playing with an LLM backed reference checker for my partner who is a lecturer. For each reference in some work she's marking an agent is dispatched to read the referenced source and check that the reference is correct / accurate / not hallucinated.

It's useful to her, but it feels like it would be a waste of effort to turn into a product, because pasting the same document into Claude/ChatGPT with a prompt like "download and read each reference etc" would work pretty much just as well.

I had similar concerns about an AI backed training generation company I interviewed with. I asked how they saw themselves competing with increasingly capable generic harnesses. I don't recall exactly what they said but the impression I got was they were so focused on competing with the big LMS players that they hadn't really considered it.

I believe it completely depends on your values and perspective, as a poor analogy: when mobile apps were a novelty a bunch of them were just that, novelties, the beer drinking app, the flicking a Zippo-esque app, and many more that hadn't much functionality, were more a tech demo, cool toys, etc.

If you don't care so much about adding something significant to the world, and your LLM-buttons-wrapper is a novelty, chug along and see where it goes if you're having fun. Looking for what value mean at this moment is a much harder effort, and probably a luck-based endeavour.

I don't have fun creating LLM-wrappers or at least haven't thought of a fun idea for it that could be even a fun novelty to work on so personally I'm not doing it but I'm using LLMs for other fun stuff that required much more of my free time before.

Making the edge cases work, and lowering the cost of running it via good model choice, context management etc is in some cases really hard. That's valuable in a decent number of cases. I have a system that does something in financial markets - making sure it doesn't screw up, and doesn't cost a fortune to run, is the entire thing for me.

Typically maintenance, reliability, support and liability; nothing new in SaaS land. Lots of companies have the money to hand-roll things that are provided by some external SaaS but would much rather it was someone else’s problem.

Also for creatives, some sort of aesthetic control? Most of the examples on this page look like templates you’d see in an office suite that appear swish, but are ultimately bland.

Even if I could answer your question (which I can't), things change so fast right now that it might not be valid for long. All you can do is be willing to rapidly adapt and stay focused on where your product adds value.

Doesn't need to have technical meat to it, conditionally ever really needed to per se, as long as it has a design / context moat. The thing is that designs are now trivial to copy. So what remains is who provides a more reliable service, supporting and continuing that design, and how well connected the person selling the thing is, to surface it first and to the right audience.

You are thinking from the point of view of an engineer, and risk falling into the rsync dropbox fallacy.

Start from thinking about product value add, and user behaviors first.

It's not always a call that wraps an llm.

The LLM only does average returns from average inputs.

>Or do my 20 years of saas and business development actually make my SaaS better then others?

Nope. If all your doing is prompting an agent to build stuff (especially if what it is building is based on LLMs), then you might as well take it back to the whiteboard and rethink how you're spending your time/tokens.

You could build something really useful, but if I can replicate 95% of that in a weekend with Claude I'm obviously not going to pay you for it.

Some SaaS products have network effects, but that doesn't appy to new software.

Starting a SaaS business in 2026 seems a bit silly to me. Not saying people won't make money, but you'd have to be pretty lucky.

this is why people have been suggesting an AI bubble, outside of the frontier model labs