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Comment by notarobot123 | Hacker News Reader

The risk for SaaS isn't that customers will build their own but that the barrier to entry for competitors is lower.

The Chorleywood process created mega bakeries that displaced regular bakeries because they changed the economics. AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production. What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

SaaS isn't going to sublimate straight into consumer built tools but the boiling point for competition has gotten a lot lower.

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I don’t agree. I think businesses including SaaS are not primarily their tech, but are mostly composed of other functions: sales, marketing, customer success, product management, strategy etc. The value is actually more in these other components than in the code.

For some businesses yes, but for many no, the software and the infrastructure are all that matters and hopefully they don’t touch what works and don’t add features no one asked for.

Sure, but code isn't the only barrier that's been lowered. A competent entrepreneurial team can also scale their sales, marketing and customer success workflows with AI.

I'm not saying business is easy now. I'm saying that a small team of smart people can do a whole lot more with the tools available to them. You still need strategy and vision (or the ability to copy someone else's playbook) but execution is a lot cheaper.

Agree the functions aren't primarily their tech, but all of their activities ends up serving a business outcome, usually manifested in code (with much distilled or cut along the way). Marketing, PM, and strategy aren't directly shipping slides or docs to production - but they should get distilled into code that ships to fulfill the activity's productivity (decisions, features, etc.).

yes, this is the point the article completely glosses over. the threat isn't that a non-technical founder is going to build their own custom CRM, but that a couple of college kids in a dorm can build something that can compete against your SaaS in a weekend. While the cost of software production drops to zero with the advancement AI and with newer model being better than ever, the market gets flooded with infinite cheap alternative. If I see another calorie tracking AI SaaS, I'm going to lose it.

Yes, I don’t know why a lot of this articles oversee this fact. Economics of SaaS will change not because customer will build their bakeries, there will be tons of bakeries selling cheaper bread.

for enterprise level dependability and support should normally be the winner.

There’s a very low cost to buying bad bread: you throw it away and don’t go there again.

Connecting your business to a SaaS is very different and comes with much higher costs if you pick a bad solution.

> AI is doing the same and fundamentally changing the economics of production.

Not really. SaaS were already trivially replaceable; it's just slightly cheaper now. But the line item is still a line item.

> What used to take years and huge teams to build can be built by much smaller teams much faster.

It takes years to develop a product, but only weeks or maybe a couple months to replace. You're greatly overestimating the work that goes into building a clearly defined product.

The expensive part for producers is figuring out what to sell and how to define the market. The expensive part for customers is burning capital while chasing after customers who would rather not think about the tools they've already committed to paying for. AI just burns the fat off of an already lean process.

This is only relevant at the lower end, when you don’t really care about the company you’re paying, as long as it fixes your issue.

At the high end, big companies are loathe to trust new AI-coded-looking startups. Relationships and meetings are a lot more important at that level.

Competitors was always possible even before AI, you could hire cheap and good developers you build almost anything even without AI, marketing and sales are more valuable when dealing with competition not devs/engineering

This could start a race to the bottom where only large SaaS variety stores survive. They all will have a "Jira" in their portfolio.

Building alone isn’t the solution. Finding distribution is.

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