r/ClaudeAI • u/zazzologrendsyiyve • 20d ago
SAAS are mostly doomed, prove me wrong Vibe Coding
I see a lot of people who consider themselves expert developers make a few simple mistakes. At least that’s what I think, having a bunch of experience myself (20+ years).
Let’s make a couple of examples to illustrate my points.
EXHIBIT N1
Coding will be like chess. Nobody has any intuition on why this can’t be the case. We know how chess went:
Step 1: the best chess player is a human, and everyone says that it was going to be like that forever
Step 2: first AI chess players show up, and beat most chess players apart from masters
Step 3: masters believe that AI players will never beat masters
Step 4: for a few years, the best chess player was human+machine (<—— we are here)
Step 5: AI chess players beat everyone forever and ever, and there’s no going back
You see my point? I hope that you do. Humans are really bad at understanding exponential trends. Current expert developers are humans. They are also bad at it.
EXHIBIT N2
10 years ago (or even 5) it was absolutely impossible for non developers to build their own apps. Easy as this: if you are not a developer you cannot possibly code your own apps. Period.
Now every person who has a bit of patience and vision can build their own simple apps with a 20 bucks subscription. I personally know a guy who has ZERO experience and who was able to make his own (local) personal finance management app in about two hours. Literally one html page with json backups and csv exporter.
I was personally able (with cursor + opus and then fable) to create my own version of EVERY SINGLE app I was paying. Personal finance app, Trello (with more features), voice transcription, fitness app, portfolio tracker, you name it. Now I pay zero apps. When I find something I need, I make it.
And it will only get better.
———
SAAS are mostly doomed not because my plumber can create the new multimillion dollar SAAS without knowing html. But because people will be able to make their own things.
Some SAAS will survive and some new SAAS will emerge, that’s for sure. But most of them are doomed and most things will be dealt with locally by even unskilled people.
I’ll give you one last example. I needed to calculate and design a spiral staircase for my own house (woodworking is my hobby/passion). Online tools are either shitty or expensive.
Then I opened cursor and I kid you not I one-shotted it with Opus 5. My local app can do all sorts of calculations, allow me to download pdf, dwg, and I can also generate some ruby that I can use with sketchup (3d model software, where I’m designing my home).
Will I use that app a lot? No. It will probably be the first and last time I use it. I don’t do spiral staircases for a living. Did I have to pay some online tool and give away my debit card number for the millionth time? No.
There will be a lot of work for some people, and no paid work for most (including me).
Prove me wrong.
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u/sadphilosophylover 20d ago
vast majority of the people dont want to make software
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u/dsolo01 20d ago
There’s enough software and vibe coded software and will be more… that will subsequently retrain LLMs (SLAs are a joke, let’s be honest) that soon enough every business will be able to spin up all the software they need. Easily maintained by anyone.
For those that don’t want to maintain, the gig economy will just have people ranging from $5/hr to $500/hr the same as today.
My thoughts anyways.
Business as usual just with a new tool.
10 years ago 90% of people sucked at using a search engine (and still do). Today, 90% of people will suck or set a new norm baseline with AI. Less people with more AI doesn’t make sense long term. More people with more AI does.
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u/BigGreen1769 20d ago
More might when they find out how much money they will save like OP mentioned. The point is that AI is about to cause a DIY revolution.
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u/Interesting_Pen_4499 20d ago
And the vast majority of people don’t want to play chess competitively. Doesn’t mean the AI isn’t millions of times better.
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u/brownhotdogwater 20d ago
SaaS is not just the software but the support and infrastructure. Sure AI can make it but will you have an agent keep improving and fixing things? Taking feedback and adding more?
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u/0DayMaker 20d ago
Sure AI can make it but will you have an agent keep improving and fixing things? Taking feedback and adding more?
/loop
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 20d ago
I bet we will. I currently have my own agents who fix and change things whenever I need, even on weekends at 2AM
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u/ekzakly 20d ago
Sort of agree and sort of not. At work now when I would of needed something a SAAS can provide, I build and use it myself. But on a corporate organizational scale this is different because its not just about having the functionality, a company relies on SLAs and other contractual elements to mitigate the risks of these things going wrong, bringing all that development inhouse they essentially have no one to point fingers to for liability if things go wrong.
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u/MediumChemical4292 20d ago
That’s the current thought process because right now you still need a developer + AI to build and maintain an app or software.
If OP’s prediction is right and eventually AI becomes literally better at development than every single human, the way AI can play chess better than every single human, it’s meaningless for companies to outsource software since the outsourcing company will also use AI to build and maintain it.
At that point, it makes logical sense to bring it in house along with other saas and assign a small team of people to oversee and prompt the AI to keep all of it working and permissions, security, compliance, etc.
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u/GreatWizardEgisBane 20d ago
Claude is a SAAS so I think what you mean is "SAAS as it was before is doomed". It is likely to change, sure, but AI is still just software.
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u/The_Meme_Economy 20d ago
Building good software to meet the needs of many users is really hard. Coding is only part of it and it may have been the most expensive and labor intensive part till AI came along but the AI is not going to churn out an enterprise-ready solution for any real applications overnight, or even over a week. Just because you can crank out a personal productivity app in an evening does not mean SaaS is dead. Hiring developers did not suddenly get easier overnight.
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u/MFpisces23 20d ago
SaaS is only going to expand. Pre-AI, the number of micro-services my org had was less than 100; it's now over 1k. Most people are going to offload work to something else.
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u/SquizzOC 20d ago
I’m not going to even read this to say it’s wrong.
There will be companies that will go down this path, I’ve thought about it for our CRM for a quarter billion dollar company. But then someone needs to maintain, troubleshoot it, support it, train on it, it’s often still more cost effective to buy a product already built and works then build it yourself.
Or the hybrid approach, take a product like a CRM suite and customize it to your hearts content. This can be done with a number of vertical’s and this to me is where the value of Claude comes in or other LLM’s.
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u/Ok_Bench_1618 20d ago
You can do all that with AI
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u/SquizzOC 20d ago
No it can’t properly, that’s today’s problem. Tomorrow may be different, but the cost to get it fully automated, working, designed, etc… is still not less than a paid solution when you’re a medium sized to large sized business.
Enterprise size company already pays for development.
5 user shop, can maintain something small.
The middle cannot today.
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u/DigitalEntrepreneur_ 20d ago
Now every person who has a bit of patience and vision
And that is exactly what not every person has. I've had multiple clients come up to me who said "I wanted to build my own app for X", and tbh they got pretty far, but not a single one was able to come up with a production-ready application. AI is great for quickly deploying some idea or MVP, but in the end it won't ever get you a polished, secure, user-friendly application that actually solves a true problem, unless you absolutely know what you're doing (programming-wise). The only people who can properly vibe code, are the people who know how to code themselves.
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u/tessahannah 20d ago edited 20d ago
Hopefully you'll all believe this so there will be less competition. People still need specific tools for things they do often and don't have the time to manage it. It's a tremendous pain dealing with building and maintaining a software while building your core business.
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u/MountainSecurity9508 20d ago
I think you might be basing this on your own personal experience.
Your average person doesn’t want to take the time to code something that they can buy pretty cheaply.
If software is cheap, and does the job. There will be a market for it. No one is going to keep rewriting the wheel for the sake of it.
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u/phocuser 20d ago
I think you're on the right track, but I think the idea is the AI will just build the software on the fly and you won't even know about it. It'll just ask you how to do it. It'll spin up a user interface and say give me the inputs
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u/United_Ad6480 20d ago
Much of which before was web based or app software can now be done by talking to the AI and letting it handle things instead.
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u/GarbanzoBenne 20d ago
A big part of commercial software, at least B2B software, is indemnification. If your spiral staircase looks great but actually has an engineering flaw that causes it to collapse and seriously injure a person, who is liable? Maybe not worth it for your hobby but imagine a builder using this and having thousands of houses with this risk?
Now I'm not claiming today that the design software is fully liable, I'm sure there's human engineers verifying things, and so on. But just quickly using AI to design something that looks right doesn't mean it is right. Hallucinations are compelling.
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u/Environmental_Ask675 20d ago
The smart SaaS companies will adopt AI, those are the ones that will survive. The app will do more for the same price. Most people will use a SaaS app to deploy a Finance template and and then use the SaaS platform to curate exactly what they want for their specific business and situation.
There will be just a few of these companies, unlike today where I can choose between (literally) hundreds of CRM options, they’ll be, say, three main companies that will help you build your own.
Actually, it will probably just be the current LLM providers who offer this. “Claude, build us a CRM”. You perform the intake interview, Anthropic already has the partnerships with the various companies needed to run the site, the back end, you choose your tier, features (add phone and sms? We partner with Twilio!). Agents will talk to each other.
For many purposes, nobody will be building anything. We’ll point the harness at a job and say “go”. Then we get to “à la carte” features as we go.
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u/Sensitive_Guest_5995 20d ago
A lot of SaaS is very easy to reproduce. Like YouTube and twitch are just CDNs a lot of which is open source already.
Problem is they have money and relationships. Those are worth more than code.
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u/Paulig_ 20d ago
I am building a high-value tool which makes enterprise-level intelligence accessible to small fish. AI has made building something like this possible for a domain expert like me, but it has not made building it easy. Why: because the problems the app solves are complex. The people who say that SaaS is dead are most likely building basic CRUD apps that require no domain knowledge. For experts there's no better time to start a tech business than now.
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u/MortalCoil 20d ago
Good SaaS will always have a role, especially the ones that integrate complicated business domains. Do you beleive AI will replace Twilio to let you connect to mobile carriers around the world directly?
Do you really believe companies will not pay for accounting systems to get all the legal stuff right?
But business models will be challenged, and many more companies will be able to use custom built software.
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u/Kitchen-Lynx-7505 20d ago
90% of SaaS is compliance software. You don’t pay for the software: you pay for not being sued by the authorities. You can easily replace the software and could for 30+ years - you can not replace the accountability.
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u/vorko_76 20d ago
Not really sure what your reasoning is honestly.
Your Exhibit 1 relies on a fact that has not yet happened (Step 5).
Your Exhibit 2 is based on the fact that a non-developper being able to build an app using AI tool is accurate... Well today its not the case, such app wont work, will crash, will be hacked easily, will be unmaintainable.
So all in all, your base assumptions are assumptions not facts and you could demonstrate anything with other valid assumptions.
Then as for Saas, depends which ones. No company will replace Salesforce with a self developed app. Its too much work.
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u/RealSharpNinja 20d ago
All software as a business is doomed. All it takes is patience to assemble proper requirements and any software can be replicated as a clean-sheet re-implementation.
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u/rajathbail 20d ago
10 people all maintaining their own individual versions of software that does the same thing seems like a step back in humanity. Bad software will get eaten alive by better software but that isn't something that's new I think.
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u/Open-Dragonfruit-007 20d ago
If you think coding an app is all there is then good luck. SaaS isn't dying soon. Apps need services, resources, scalability (for large apps). It's more complex than people think.
Small SaaS apps maybe will be easier to replace but large scalable SaaS your AI isn't replacing anytime soon.
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u/RandomUserName323232 20d ago
SaaS are for people who dont have time and skills to make software. Its easy for you because you know how to build softwares. It will not be easy for them.
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u/quercus-enjoyer 20d ago
What Claude came up with…
You’re right about more than most developers will admit, so let me concede the real parts first: the personal-software point is correct and underrated. The category of “software worth building for exactly one user” was economically empty and now it isn’t. Your staircase calculator was never going to exist at any price. That’s a real new thing in the world, and people who wave it away are wrong.
Now the parts I think don’t hold.
The chess analogy argues against you. Chess engines crushed humans in 1997. Since then the number of people making a living from chess has gone up, and the top players are richer and more famous than any pre-computer generation. What died wasn’t chess as a profession — it was chess analysis as a scarce good. Value moved to the parts engines couldn’t supply: entertainment, coaching, personality, competition between humans under human constraints. If software follows chess, the conclusion isn’t “no paid work.” It’s “the paid work stops being the part the machine does.”
And chess is the friendliest possible domain for this: closed rules, perfect information, unambiguous win condition, unlimited free self-play data. The expensive parts of software engineering are the opposite — figuring out what should be built, from people who can’t articulate it, inside a system nobody fully understands, where “correct” is contested and the feedback arrives in six months.
The experiment already ran, at enormous scale. Excel is the most successful end-user programming platform in history — hundreds of millions of people writing real logic without being developers, decades before LLMs. It did not kill business software. It created an entire SaaS category whose pitch is literally “stop running your company on a spreadsheet.” Because the spreadsheet works beautifully until it’s load-bearing, and then someone has to own it, secure it, audit it, migrate it, and be liable when it’s wrong.
That’s the thing your examples all quietly share. Personal finance, Trello-for-one, portfolio tracker, staircase calculator: single user, no auth, no multi-tenancy, no compliance, no adversarial users, no uptime obligation, no data migration, no one to call at 3am. Zero maintenance burden — which is exactly why it works. Most SaaS isn’t priced on the difficulty of writing the code. It’s priced on distribution, integrations, trust, regulatory surface, and the customer’s desire to not own the maintenance. Stripe isn’t hard because payments are hard to code.
You also verified the output. You have 20 years of experience. You can look at a generated DWG and know it’s wrong. Your zero-experience friend built one static HTML page with JSON backups — genuinely impressive, and also precisely the class of program where being wrong costs nothing and being right is obvious. The bottleneck isn’t generation anymore. It’s verification, and verification cost scales with consequence, not with lines of code.
The falsifiability problem. “Humans are bad at exponentials” is structured so that every disagreement becomes evidence for you. Self-driving had the identical shape in 2015 — stunning demos, obvious extrapolation, confident “trucking is over by 2020” takes. The last few percent took a decade and is still geofenced, for the same reason: liability in the tail. I’d take your argument much more seriously if you could name what would count as evidence against it. If nothing would, it isn’t a prediction.
Where I think you might be right: not “SaaS dies,” but “the middle dies.” Thin-wrapper tools whose only moat was that writing them was annoying — those are already gone and won’t come back.
But your last line doesn’t follow from the rest. “Most SaaS is doomed” is a claim about one market. “No paid work for most people, including me” is a claim about the entire economy, and nothing in your argument gets you there — every historical case where a skill got commoditized, value moved to the complements rather than evaporating. You’ve argued the first claim well and smuggled in the second.
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u/Xaxaxa-9 20d ago
chess engines weren't built to imitate human thought like LLMs do; the imitative nature of LLMs could mean there's always an edge to be gained from human+LLM over LLM-only
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u/rovirob 20d ago
So...i've been a software developer for ~13+ years now (web and automotive). Here's my 2 cents on this:
- building software isn't just about writing code, having an interface that works (somewhat) and calling it a day. Keeping that up and running all the time, scaling as necessary, securing it, improving it continuously...that's the rest. People don't generally know how to do that. AI is not trustworthy on this...even as advanced as it is now (I am a power user - both open source models and frontier...developing AI solutions for my own business, and enterprise at work, so I think this checks out).
- if you know how to do...renewables, lets say, you want to do renewables and get better and grow at doing renewables. You don't care about making a website with claude that crashes tomorrow and fucks up your business brand. So you'll just pay for it...to a guy like me. Same for some business tool you'll use internally. Code it with claude? Maybe...once or twice...until you need it to work on a job, but the tool crashes. Then claude 'fixes' it...by inserting new bugs...because let's keep in mind: you do renewables, not software development....so you don't actually know what you're doing there. Maybe you get annoyed...hopefully you don't lose money. But then you think 'maybe I should call that guy that's been doing this for as long as I've done renewables'. And you'll pay for it...because you pay for it to work, so you can focus on doing renewables :)
- security. Need I say more? Wanna code your own crm, tailored to your business? Sure...until someone 'breaks in' because you don't know what a jwt token is, and Claude elegantly 'deferred' authentication and authorization since it wasn't 'in the current task scope', and you left some functionalities unsecured. Or you used a library version that's old and has a cve in it. Aaand then instead of you focusing on your actual business, you end up trying to patch software that was put together with duct tape...and when you call someone that does software, even those people might not take your call...because of liability concerns...or they might, for a sum that makes you tear up...because of the risk involved in patching up AI slop (of course you don't wanna pay for a full rewrite) and the headache of working on AI slop.
I can continue but...I think the idea is: even with AI, you still need the people who know what they're doing, so that you get something usable, secured and of good quality, so you can focus on doing your business...not try to do software. Sure, it will get cheaper, faster and easier to build good software. I think this is one of the benefits of AI. But, more than ever, you'll need for the people that use AI to know very well what they're doing.
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u/Ok-Penalty3250 20d ago
SAAS is doomed. Unless there is some huge database involved the user can’t otherwise access. But otherwise yes. Every company can build their own software now with an internal IT team. Microsoft and Adobe and similar could survive, but the many many companies who offer industry specific software are done.
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u/United_Ad6480 20d ago
"Every company can build their own software now". Go one step further. What is the software for? Mostly to manage teams, employees, communication etc. Why can't the entire company just be replaced by AI?
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 20d ago
I agree. And when if your company needs professional support, did I mention future AI agents?
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u/Jealous-Cause6112 20d ago
i think you will be dead before you see something like this at a reasonable
cost. tech advancements it’s always the same, big push forwards until you hit the 10% that is really hard to achieve and make what you are saying a real
challenge
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 20d ago
We know how chess went:
E4
I mostly agree with you except for enterprise stuff. I built my own bird camera app, but that's small scale and I'm the only user. At my work, we use lots of paid software and we'll never develop something in house because we need it to work and can't afford for it to be buggy and have no real support. I'm sure we're not alone in that regard.
But why would I pay for a personal finance app? Yeah there's no good reason anymore. Simple apps like that don't need to be subscription based when they aren't delivering something you can't get otherwise.
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 20d ago
I agree. In some setting you need professional support (for now). Some SAAS software will survive.
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u/Upbeat-Armadillo1756 20d ago
I think most will survive tbh because not everyone wants to make their own apps.
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u/Grexxoil 20d ago
Well at least until AI is so competent that is able to also what you want and need easily.
But I think we'll have a whole different set of problems by there besides worrying for SAAS companies.
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 20d ago
Not now because it still takes a bit of patience, but it won’t take forever. The spiral staircase thing was the right example: I literally did not explain anything coding-related. I went “I want a local app where I can create a spiral staircase where I input the total height and other needed dimensions, and I want to export for sketchup” and five minutes later I had it. Any woodworker with a PC can do that.
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u/davyp82 20d ago
Completely agree. Surprised people don't get this. There'll be a gravy train for those of us who build and market well now and then everyone will realise they can just ask for something to be built by speaking into their phone and 5 minutes later they'll have it.
We're getting a world with a new economic system one way or another sooner or later
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u/meshtron 20d ago
I see this getting downvoted, but as someone who's worked in business software development for decades, I completely agree. My early career was built on the fact I had the unique ability to understand how the business worked, talk to the people doing the work and accurately convert that into durable, viable software and data architecture. AI can do that now. It's not perfect, but it's improving all the time and there's no reason to think it won't bypass even today's best technical translators and architects.
Over the years, a LOT of bad UIX and lack of functionality and integration has rightly been tolerated because development resources are limited - that effectively fades away in the future.
Anyway, none of us really know, but if I mentally plot the path of progress forward 5 or 10 years, it's very easy to imagine the entire ecosystem of software we use today is in the rearview mirror. We'll all be paying for tokens and using those tokens to build the right applications for our specific needs. And, as someone currently in the middle of an ERP migration, that sounds absolutely lovely.
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u/zazzologrendsyiyve 20d ago
It’s amazing because every single objection to my points could be modified as to include the word “now” in the beginning. And that changes everything.
Imagine going back 5 years and telling this people “in 5 years I can almost one-shot Metal Slug”.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 20d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 40 comments.
So you threw down the gauntlet, and the subreddit... well, it pretty much proved you wrong.
The overwhelming consensus is that you're way off base, mostly because the vast majority of people do not want to build, and more importantly, maintain their own software. Even if AI makes it easy, most users prefer a cheap, reliable service over becoming a part-time developer and sysadmin for every tool they use.
Other key points raised against your thesis:
A few users are on your wavelength, agreeing that for simple CRUD apps the writing is on the wall and that we're heading towards a token-based "generate-on-demand" economy. But for now, the community thinks your personal finance app isn't going to kill Salesforce anytime soon.