The bespoke software revolution? I'm not buying it

christkv

Neither am I. It feels like the dotcom in the sense that people will be spitting out new apps all overt the place. Down the line they will have problems maintaining them (and will say it's not core to their business) and they will revert to SaaS. However i expect the SaaS apps to have super low margins compared to today. Instead of 20-30% it will be 5-7% and the companies will be a shadow of themselves.

kemiller

100%. Saas isn’t going away, but the economics are changing drastically and that’s bad for one-size-fits-all tools, and excellent for niche solutions. But it’s still saas, just more specific.

albertgoeswoof

Why are SaaS margins apparently dropping? The cost of producing saas is going down, no one is investing in new saas companies, the build your own saas will crumble as described in this article, meanwhile corporate IT departments will be decimated to pay for ballooning AI costs leaving saas as the only option to run companies. Are any saas companies actually reducing their prices?

b0nk3rsnNuts

SaaS dev says SaaS is the one true solution to software. Self selecting biology gonna self select.

Ancalagon

I don’t disagree if models stay as capable as they are today. But devils advocate: the point of the saaspocalypse isn’t just that anyone will be able to make their own software, it’s also that the AI will be good enough and interconnected enough to maintain it. The world these investors are envisioning is not one where a software engineer gives a detailed spec to a model and reviews its output, deploys the resulting files and monitors said application. It’s where Jo-shmo at the law firm can tell the model “give me a new billing system”, and the AI does everything correctly and better than a team of software engineers, in a matter of minutes or hours. And that AI maintains it for them, better than the engineers would have

tpetry

The doomsday saying the past months that everyone will now vibecode a solution instead of paying for SaaS as a big logic error… These people could have switched to self-hosting an open source clone of any popular SaaS but they didn‘t! Why? Because they dont want to be the person maintaining this, so we should those people not self-hosting a free software now go one step further and also build those products?

3hoss

> Most people don’t like computers. Ummmm, what? People love their smartphones, and do you know what those are? Computers.

gwbas1c

> Most people don’t like computers. Nobody in tech wants to say that out loud. People tolerate computers. They use them because they have to. Given the choice, most would rather not think about them at all. Which makes me think there's a lot more room for "virtual people." Imagine a very smart AI bot that could hold multiple conversations at once and remember a lot of things. > So when someone suggests that AI means everyone will build their own custom tools, ask who "everyone" is. The three-person accounting firm drowning in client paperwork? They want the paperwork gone, not a new system to maintain. The regional logistics company with 40 trucks? They want the routes optimized, not Joe spouting off about this new system he’s been messing around with. The law firm billing 70-hour weeks? They want leverage on their time, not a software project to design. What if there was a bot that was just smart enough to figure those things out, without needing traditional "software"? To me, that's more what AI is, instead of adding chatbots to everything, and vibecoding everything.

senko

With all due respect to what Jason Fried &co have achieved, this is wrong. Bespoke sofware does exist. And yes, consultants small and large have built, deployed, and charged through the roof for bespoke software. And often it sucks. Here's why it sucks: because clients can't coherently describe what they need, don't have a budget, consultancies don't care and - critically - the person writing the spec (and controling the budget) isn't the same person that will use it. (here you also have "A Tragedy of EdTech" in one sentence, but that's a different post) But there's another kind of bespoke software, which, for a lack of a better name, I'll unimaginatively call "internal tool". This is what VB6/Access/VBA/HyperCard enabled back in the day, what Retool tried to own recently, and what many Excel spreadsheets are secretly doing. This is duct-taped-code-pasta that barely holds but does exactly what the business needs, and nothing more. I've seen and heard of many cases already of non-techies doing exactly that. It's not scalable, it's not maintainable, it doesn't follow best practices, it doesn't have tests or docs, but it doesn't matter, because it works and solves a biz problem. The reason it works is that the person can iteratively narrow down to what they need, feedback is instant, iteration is minutes not days or weeks and is super cheap (compared to external developers). No sane freelancer or agency would ship something like it - for many reasons: as a software engineer you want to ship quality product and charge appropriate amount of money. Many times, that's the right thing for the customers. Often, it's overkill, and these types of smaller "quick win" projects never get started in the first place. And there's loads of potential projects like these! So yeah, nobody will vibe-code a payroll system for 100+ person company, nor should they. But people absolutely will, and already do, whip up something that solves their niche problem. Now maybe they'll use AI instead of Excel.

SunshineTheCat

The main point everyone seems to be making is that now with AI anyone can make a SaaS. The initial reaction I think most people have to this is "SaaS companies/devs are in trouble." I actually think the opposite is true. With an outpouring of vibe-coded apps/SaaS, you have the new wave of vulnerabilities/leaks/problems that happen even with the best software. Except now, it's worse because it's being done on platforms "built" by people who haven't the slightest clue how they work. One of many examples: https://dig.watch/updates/women-only-dating-app-tea-suffers-... This I imagine will, over time, erode trust in most apps/SaaS products. With that erosion of trust will come skepticism and with that, will come trust in the "old faithful" of SaaS products/companies. Basecamp is a good example of this. I could be wrong on this one, but it seems to me those that have built credibility for privacy/security/competence will become more valuable in the AI age, not less.

gos9

Incentive check! The author seems to have a vested interest in people not making their own software. Curious

sitkack

I am +5 on browser extensions just for me.

dajonker

> they're almost always people who already had some pull toward software I think this is probably true, and basically how I got into software myself. I always dabbled in writing software and things for the web, but for some reason I never thought studying computer science would be any fun and that a career as a software developer sounded boring. But then I got an actual full time office job and oh boy, did my perspective on things change fast. That first job did not have anything to do with writing software at all. But I saw people struggle with things that seemed to me trivial to automate, such as making annotations on paper bank statements and entering them into the system line-by-line. The bookkeeping system did support electronic bank statements, but lacked features to match certain descriptions to certain cost places. In the end it was indeed faster to go the paper route... It took me a couple of hours to write something that saved hours every week and that basically kick started my software career. Would AI have made much of a difference here? Yes, in terms of getting to the correct solution faster, but probably not in terms of who would have done that. People would still come to the person who came up with the solution to ask for maintenance and new features.

dagss

However, if you move from "bespoke" to just "very small niches", I think lower production costs of software may well open up opportunities that were earlier unprofitable.

BloondAndDoom

It will be race to bottom for SaaS in terms of pricing, with lots of alternatives to every SaaS. It’s not about personal software it’s about how 1-3 people team will deliver a SaaS that actually works at scale for the 1/10th of the price. In terms of personal software, he’s absolutely right, it’s great for hobbyist and things like in house tooling but that’s it.

payne92

When the cost of software drops, supply increases. That means we'll see even more niche apps, and more custom apps. That doesn't mean everyone becomes a builder. It means that the people who can build can now do so much more cheaply. Custom apps that were previously too expensive may now be cost-effective.

wxw

Strongly agree. Personal software is also personal responsibility. It’s fun to dream up features, much less fun to be responsible for their implementation and maintenance.

afro88

I vibe coded a saas and it went nowhere because it wasn't a good enough idea to begin with. I consulted with multiple varied models along the way for competitive analysis, pricing structure etc. AI doesn't solve for ideas and product market fit. But it did allow me to fail pretty fast before I sunk too much time into it. But also, I should have spoken to potential users earlier rather than vibe coding.

_pdp_

Yes and no. At the individual level, I think most people will be writing software, whether they realise it or not. Asking Claude to do something for you will often result in a purely generated script built for that one specific task. Some might even take it further, generating custom dashboards or whatever else they need to support their work. At the company level though... most companies can hardly maintain opensource deployments, let alone write and maintain their own bespoke software. Pick any company that uses GitLab, they're probably a few major versions behind. It's across the board. There's no doubt people will try to write more software. But we've all seen how this plays out. The smart engineer who built a weekend solution leaves, and nobody supports the software afterward. Coding agents certainly help, and only time will tell, but my bet is that for most organisations it will end up miserably.

mekoka

Do some people really believe that SaaS margins are dropping because the public at large has discovered that to save 20$/month on some app they can instead vibe code their own and use that instead? My current guess about the future is that the age of SaaS is coming stronger than ever. I expect many vibe coders to come up with half-assed prototypes that will be copiously replicated and improved by more qualified devs aided by LLMs. In a similar way, I also expect smaller qualified teams (3 to 5) to leverage LLMs to become more relevant competitors of medium to large SaaS players. By 2029, we'll have more, but smaller SaaS companies.