Micro-SaaS Is Dead. Service With A Software Replaces It
adriengonin.com
adriengonin.com
I try to learn writing and copywriting directly in english to avoid the awkward translation effect, but I focus more on the rythm, structure and content than the prasing itself
If you're sincere then I'm afraid you're being led on by the lazy.
When tasked with translating a document, unless instructed otherwise, the LLM does not inject its own cliched stories, narrative structures and assorted engagement tricks.
It's possible they're all lying. It's very unlikely that zero of them are lying, as I happen to be in a place where I get exposed to this, so I've seen it a lot. But I've seen it an awful lot for it all to be liars.
Unfortunately, I don't speak a foreign language fluently enough to test it myself. I have some I can kind of verify that the translation is literally accurate but I don't have any second language I could do a style translation for.
i wish the translation tool would tell me if it can't directly translate a word because of misspellings or abbreviations. i learned that i have to write in a very explicit straight forward way, with each sentence standing on its own to make sure i get sensible translations.
It's a shame that the models can't better preserve people's voices for this use case.
If you miss the message, one less person to compete with.
It's easy to build something for yourself that solves your own use case. You know how you work and what's important to you. Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.
> Whatever niche tool you’re sketching this week, a thousand people can prompt a working version by Sunday night
A lot of people on HN are naturally builders. For them it's fun to play around with AI and see what can be built. Not everyone is like that.
For individuals, how many people actually want to spend their weekends building a niche tool for themselves vs just paying a few dollars a month to access something that does the job even though it may not be perfect?
For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally, there will be people with feature requests for it. Before you know it, the company is diverting resources away from their core business for a support tool that doesn't really drive impact.
I think we'll see more options in the marketplace as individuals will be able to get started more easily but SaaS is far from dead.
Fully agreed. It's also just a time saver. People are lazy, and I don't mean that in a bad way, just that people don't really want to sit there and explain to an agent exactly what they want software to function like. In fact, most people don't even actually know what they want software to function like.
It doesn't just stop at humans either. When I recently started creating my smart budgeting app, Claude pointed me to use Clerk for auth. So not even the AI wants to build everything from scratch.
It took me an extra day of agent-prodding and code review.
And I still will have to add SSO and Google/whoever sign-in and passkeys and 2FA at some point.
Using Clerk would've avoided that, but at a permanent cost of one more dependency.
At my job (we're somewhere in the transition between startup -> enterprise), we still use a lot of SaaS and are continuing to do so, but even there we're starting to move off certain platforms (Pendo, is a recent casualty) as we've realized in many cases we can just build it ourselves, pay drastically less, and actually get to control how it all works.
My suspicion, though I could be wrong: SaaS will move more and more towards focusing solely on the enterprise. Personal users and startups will have a harder time justifying both the cost and lack of flexibility of pure software SaaS. Enterprise will continue to be ok with paying the costs in exchange for compliance and vendor stuff and integration and whatever else they care about.
…as are your own, perfectly custom security vulnerabilities and their successful exploitations.
Moreso while a custom build software just for you is a great fit for your own processes you are loosing innovation and what you could benefit from using a software where someone is trying to innovate and bring out better things that you might not know even to ask for in a prompt as that is not your own domain of expertise or better said you are too expert in your own process that you cannot see what else is out there. And to overcome this you have to try to put in resources for this tool.
100%, which is why I think hyper-tailored, small software is an exciting option. When you shift your goal to serve 1000 customers, the hardest part is not having a tech stack that supports them, but making sure the software is good enough for all their different needs. Or you try to meet them all and you get into feature creep.
> For businesses, the buy vs. build tradeoff does now have some new compelling evidence in favour of "buy" but there's still maintenance needed for the service internally
What if you neither buy or build the software but buy the service outcome?
A data analyst that creates custom workflows with auto-generated dashboards. A dev-ops that provides access with exactly the information you need, depending on the hand-off level you want for the process.
My point is that a lot of these micro tools that started to appear the last few years will vanish, either bundled with bigger SAAS, internalized, or shifted to a service offering. This trend started with productized services, this is the next step.
> SaaS is far from dead.
Micro SAAS*. I agree with all your points, but I do believe the small software landscape will change drastically in the coming years
At work, which I won't say where, we replaced a few SaaS we were using with in-house software. We largely have a culture of in-house software so it made sense. These were not small tools. They were behemoths created by multi-billion dollar software houses. And we replaced them, entirely, in the span of weeks. The reason it worked is we already had many domain experts in those tools.
The advantages don't stop at "money". The biggest advantage is complete control. We can integrate across our other tools, for free. We can add whatever features we want.
I have my own "bandsintown" for example because I want to avoid the advertisement shitshow. I have a number of very specific tools for building software. I doubt I ever package up any of this for use by others much less try to monetize it.
That is the vibe I got from this article. This is a good concept to have in your (meta) toolbelt.
I mean the website does look good, it's just hard to read.
Subjectively, even without vision problems, I strongly dislike your choice also.
Your "paper" choice is #bfbfc4 - even going to #ddd makes the APCA go from ~63 to 80 and would probably address the complaints handily. WCAG has a lot of gaps.
Anyway, did a quick fix, should be enough for now
My reasoning is people aren’t happy with many of the titans we have for certain apps, uber is my favorite example. Everyone hates the price it charges thinks it’s unfair, but to go back to a time before uber is unfathomable.
That to me is a ripe market to be overtaken. What it really needs is a taxi driver or operator so fed up with the current system they spend their energy organizing and making their own uber with less greed.
For sure not every tool will become huge, but most of the tools we use nowadays started with someone having a problem, being frustrated with the status quo, and having the will and means to execute.
The means necessary to execute get lower and lower everyday.
OP is ascribing magical powers to AI which it does not have. sure, it can replace a shitty poorly coded todo app. but nobody wanted that anyway.
It's a network.
Uber is not a saas, it sell the ability to match drivers with people. You can code an uber-like software easily and you will find that it leads to nowhere: no network => no driver + no consumer = you have nothing
Another kind of business is online bank: are they just software ? Yes, obviously. Are they software-as-a-service ? Obviously not: they sell regulation, integration with financial stuff, government approbation and what-not
Just because a company is used via software-only does not mean that it has a saas
On the other hand, you have companies like tesla, which are far more "software-as-a-service" than online banks
What a funny world
I do think one claim is spot on - as production costs go down customization becomes cheap. This makes it economically viable to build products, especially more complex ones, for niche markets. Hubspot for medical? No problem. MailChimp for music clubs? You got it.
Ultimately, the value remained in the same place - create something people are willing to pay for. The economics might have changed, certainly for software development job market - but honestly, as a developer myself, I've always felt coding is not hard enough or valuable enough for the society to justify the insanely high salaries.
The point is that simple apps like these have just become insanely competitive to distribute, and it's best not to think of it as mini businesses
> Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I've not necessarily thought about myself.
For me a product = a packaged set of tools.
What was interesting with the micro-saas wave is that a lot of people started to build products around one simple tool. It worked because sometimes a well-crafted one is better unbundled. Here's one example that thrived on this premise: https://www.bannerbear.com/
The only thing AI is crushing is newcomers.
Standalone software has expertise and distribution, the only 2 things that matter and that your new software does not have.
Also the needs of a business have nothing to do with software you vibe code for yourself. Its compliance, backups, reliability. Not a few features claude did for you.
The same set of things like skills, and custom tools etc can actually be used to get faster to the a product that kind of fits 1000 customers. But the change is that one can build even more custom things for some customers with those skills and tools.
Last year I built a custom integration for a customer in 2 weeks. Now I can probably do it in 2 days. What does that mean for the future, I have no idea, but surely getting custom solutions like this would be more of a moat not less.
Another way to say the same thing is that many (not all, of course) SAAS were already service with a software, especially when starting out.
But we do see a sharp rise in the release of apps, without the same tendency in use. [1]
I do think there will be a place for SAAS, even micro-SAAS, but the competition will be fierce and I don't have a lot of hope for indiehacker without any "unfair advantages" like unique knowledge, data, network, etc
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ericseufert_this-ft-chart-vis...
https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/episodes/episode-842-...
care to share some key takeaways? not really keen on listening to a half hour audio.
The episode was worth my time.
I think "the context" the author defines also includes harder to unlock peripheral components that makes software products in 2026 defensible.
For example, security is getting harder not easier. Enterprise trust rides on needing to have up-to-date knowledge on data regulation as well.
Relationships, brand maturity, discovery; all of that becomes rarified as we continue to reduce the actual product launch curve -- but also the "harder to do" hygiene stuff that takes you from a "I vibe coded this in two days, good luck" to a "your successful company can count on us" type of hardening has become progressively more of a baseline requirement.
Will they invest more into in-house security? (Doubting the last one).
For small apps used to deliver a service in my examples, I believe the risk surface is way narrower, which might make it more acceptable. For better of for worse
Not to forget DVD shipping eras (Sony should not discontinue physical game sales, someone needs to get us silicon/holographic/terabyte recording media already), the focus is on the bundling/unbundling of software making. Slack + Salesforce vs 'we vibed our own chat and CRM just for us'...aka a Neo-SAP ERP program.
It's a cambrian explosion of software where lots are going to learn in realtime that the code was never the value of a software engineer / software, the value is in the shared understanding of an information system or workflow or business value stream, that parts of which happen to run through digital information systems.
By the time AI is done with us, its market effects mean in order to stay employable/added value beyond just widget-watchers, we will all be business strategy experts, or we will be algorithm-fed-doped-up mindless beasts, Morlocks vs Eloi, not because of AI itself, but because of the current rapaciousness of business leaders and an assumed trajectory where society doesn't adapt to social movements and actions now made possible by the existence of LLMs.
Sidneote: the LLMs themselves are not IMO going to achieve AGI any time soon. There might be a compilation of disparate systems and LLMs form part of 'tissues' of an eventual AGI, but not currently.
We will either be experts in asbestos chemistry, safety mechanisms, and remediation... or we'll be helping people tweak it for sale as kitchen sponges and pinatas.
Deal with one customer can be quite a nightmare, and honestly, sometimes using off the shelf solutions can result in saving time and money.
Even today I'm creating SaaS, not every problem is simple to solve. Take a look at CRMs, there are thousands of CRMs due to enormous egos wanting to build "my way", "the way", "the superior way", "our company is not like others (LOL)", etc. At the end of the day it's just a database with CRUDish UI.
My customers pay me to solve their problem well because they can not solve it themselves, when they do they just don't have the time.
Reality check: I have been coding many products with all frontiers models: Still takes a lot of time and, surprise surprise!, money for tokens. Ironically software development became more expensive for serious software that won't vibe-break/vibe-delete-prod/vibe-delete-database.
https://github.com/maximelebreton/quick-javascript-switcher
By default, I don't run into these problems and save a lot of compute!