Comment by akra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akra | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The question is not whether you can or can't, but whether it is still worth it long term:

- There is a moat of doing so (i.e. will people actually pay for your SaaS knowing that they could do it too via AI) and..

- How many large scale ideas do you need post AI? Many SaaS products are subscription based and loaded with features you don't need. Most people would prefer a simple product that just does what they need without the ongoing costs.

There will be more software. The question is who accrues the economic value of this additional software - the SWE/tech industry (incumbent), the AI industry (disruptor?) and/or the consumer. For the SWE's/tech workers it probably isn't what they envisioned when they started/studied for this industry.

It seems obvious to me it is the consumer who will benefit most.

I had been thinking of buying an $80 license for a piece of software but ended up knocking off a version in Claude Code over a weekend.

It is not even close to something commercial grade that I could sell as a competitor but it is good enough for me to not spend $80 on the license. The huge upside is that I can customize the software in any way I like. I don't care that it isn't maintainable either. Making a new version in ChagGPT5 is going to be my first project.

Just like a few hours ago I was thinking how I would like to customize the fitness/calorie tracking app I use. There are so many features I like that would be tightly coupled to my own situation and not a mass market product.

This to me seems obvious of what the future of software looks like for everything but mission critical software.

This has a lot of future implications for employment in tech of course, architecture/design decisions, etc. Why would a non-tech company use a SaaS when it just AI up something and have 1-2 engineers on the build accountable? Its a lot cheaper and amortisable over many products saving some companies millions. Not just tech implementors but sales staff would be disrupted. Especially when the SaaS is implementing a standard or requires significant customisation anyway. Buy vs build, product vs implementation, it should all change soon - the silver lining in all of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com