I imagine you're going to have people trying to automate the whole GTM lifecycle, but eventually the developer that thinks they can bootstrap a one man enterprise without actually doing any kind of social interaction will run into a wall.
Prototype maybe. Go to market maybe not so. It's giving false hope. You're just taking more shortcuts with prototyping.
Although the proponents of this idea argue that companies will create and (!) maintain many tools in-house.
It’s not so much about running a business, since you don’t sell anything and only have internal customers.
When management realise that the vibe coded projects are not maintainable, SAAS will be as popular as ever
Paper forms have some amazing features that software really can't compete with. And also some significant downsides that software fixes.
They are not stupid, far from it, most are (very) high functioning sociopaths. And out and up there its everybody for themselves first.
what if the expensive SAAS offering is just as vibe coded and poor quality as what a junior offers?
A typical SaaS customer will use many pieces of software (we mostly call them SaaS now) across its various functions: HR, accounting, CRM, etc. Each one of those will have access to the same pool of senior devs and AI tools, but they will pour more resources into each area and theoretically deliver better software.
The bigger issue here is the economics of the C-suite have not changed here. Assume a 100 CPG company uses 10-20 SaaS apps. Salesforce might be $100k/year or whatever. 1Password is $10k. Asana $10k. etc. They add up, but on the other hand it is not productive to task a $150k employee with rebuilding a $10k tool. And even with AI, it would take a lot of effort to make something that will satisfy a team accustomed to any modern SaaS tool like Salesforce or Atlassian. (Engineers will not even move off Github, and it's literally built on free software.)
That's before I get to sensitive areas. Do you want to use a vibe-coded accounting system? Inventory system? Payroll? You can lose money, employees, and customer perception very rapidly due to some bugs. Who wants to be responsible for all their employee passwords are compromised because they wanted to save $800/mo?
Then, the gains from cutting SaaS are capped. You can only cut your SaaS spend to zero. On the other hand, if you have those engineers you can point them at niche problems in your business niche (which you know better than anyone) and create conditions for your business to grow faster. The returns from this are uncapped.
TL;DR; it's generally not a great idea to build in-house unless your requirements are essentially bespoke.
The second question is a valid one, and I think it will somewhat raise the bar of what successful SAAS vendors will have to offer in coming years
Somehow that has not happened yet in 2026.
At the end of the day these decisions are all series of trade-offs, and the trick is understanding your requirements and capabilities well enough to make the right trade-offs.
2. Company uses it, maybe even starts to rely on it for important business operations, and for a time the employee supports that app.
3. Bugs creep in, feature request pile up.
4. Employee either leaves the company or moves on to another project.
5. Pain
Doing this today, in production, with full trust, is clearly not wise, but the writing is clearly on the wall that this is going to be the norm more and more over the coming years. The times they are a-changin.
1) Uptime (though this could be partially alleviated by retries)
and most of all:
2) "Trust"/"Spam score"
It's the main reason to use Sendgrid, AWS, Google, etc. Their "value" is not the email service, it's that their SMTP servers are trusted.
If tomorrow I can just send from localhost instead of going through Google it's fine for me, but in reality, my emails won't arrive due to these filters.
But yes, the “trust / spam score” is a legit challenge. If only device manufacturers were held liable for security flaws, but we sadly don’t live in that timeline.
I had quite a bit of success with it and of course, DKIM and the other measures you can take some years back.
For personal emails, I don't think I had any which fed straight into spam.
See jwz's struggles with hosting his own email. (Not linking to his blog here with HN as the referrer...)
With email, the 800 lb gorillas won, and in the end it didn't even solve the spam problem.
Maintenance is probably my number one reason for giving up on projects where I'm responsible for feeding the pet.
(Back then email still worked from residential IP addresses, and wasn't blocked by default)
No amount of LLM usage is going to change them into full stack vibe coders who moonlight as sysadmins. I just don't see it happening.
Not until, that is, a new generation, that has grown accustomed to the tech, takes over.
Until then the current SMBs will for the most part fulfill their IT needs from SaaS businesses (of which I think there will be more due to LLMs lowering the barrier for those of us who feel confident in our coding and sysadmin skills already).
Not trying to hype AI, but we are in an interesting transitional period.
related: i'm thinking these vibe coded solutions are revealing to everyone how important and under appreciated good UX is when it comes to implicit education of any given thing. Like given this complex process, the UX is holding your hand while educating you through a workflow. this stuff is part of software engineering yet it isn't "code".
These are real risks to these companies.
Your in-house teams can build replacements, it's just a matter of headcount. With Claude, you can build it and staff it and have time left over. Then your investment pays dividends instead of being a subscription straight jacket you have to keep renting.
I think there's an even faster middle ground: open source AI-assisted replacements for SaaS are probably coming. Some of these companies might offer managed versions, which will speed up adoption.
Lets take Figma as an example, Imagine you have 1000 employees, 300 of them need Figma, so you are paying 120k per year in Figma licenses. You can afford 1 employee working on your own internal Figma. you are paying the same but getting 100x worst experience, unless your 1 employee with CC can somehow find and copy important parts of Figma on his own, deploy and keep it running through the year without issues, which sounds ludicrous.
If you have less than 1000 employees it wouldnt even make sense to have 1 employee doing Figma
B2B SaaS is a VULN. They get bought out, raise prices, fail. And then you have extremely large amounts of unplanned spend and engineering to get around them.
I remember when we replaced the feature flags and metrics dashboards with SignalFX and LaunchDarkly. Both of those went sour. SignalFx got bought out and quadrupled their insane prices. LaunchDarkly promised the moon, but their product worked worse than our in-house system and we spent nearly a year with a couple of dedicated headcount engineering workarounds.
Atlassian, you name it - it's all got to go.
I just wish I could include AWS in this list. Compute and infra needs to be as generic as water.
If you're working at SaaS, find an exit. AI is coming for you. Now's a great time to work on the AI replacement of your product.
You get the same shocks with internal teams, just from other causes. And you have to manage them.
I'm sure you've only ever seen brilliant software created by internal software teams?
I have no idea how you are spending "large amounts" of unplanned spend on Saas products. Every company I worked for had Saas subscription costs being under 1% of capex. Unless you add AWS, which is actually "large amounts" but good luck vibe coding that.
We had an in-house system that worked, but it was a two pizza team split between time series and logging. "Internal weirdware" got thrown around a lot, so we outsourced to SignalFx for a few years. It was bumpy. I liked our in-house system better, and I didn't build it.
Splunk then buys SignalFx and immediately multiplies the pricing at a conveniently timed contract renewal. Suddenly every team in the company has to plan an emergency migration.
Your supply chain is messed up. You need sign longer contracts with price guarantees.
I mean if we want recent examples just look at tailwindui since it's technically a SaaS.
This is a terrible example. Show me someone ripping out their SAP ERP or SalesForce CRM system where they're paying $100k+ for a vibe coded alternative and I'll believe this overall sentiment.
Just because it cannot be done today, doesn't mean there is not a real appetite in large enterprises to do exactly this.
Without naming names, I know of at least one public company with a real hunger for exactly this eventuality.
Of course, once AGI is available (if it is ever) everything changes. But for now someone needs to have the deep expertise.
I cannot imagine an SMB or fortune 500 ripping out Salesforce or SAP. However, I can see a point-tool going away (e.g., those $50/mo contracts which do something tiny like connect one tool to another.)
That means to keep making money they need keep selling new people. According to them, their only marketing channel was the Tailwind docs, AI made it so not nearly as many people needed to visit the tailwind docs.
If they had gone with the subscription SaaS model, they'd probably be a little better off, as they would have still had revenue coming in from their existing users.
Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool
It used to be that your new b2b product has to try and displace a spreadsheet. Now it has to displace an agent.
How is it in any way B2B? At most B2C + freelancers / individuals / really small SME.
It didn't have any clues a med/large B2B would look for e.g. SSO, SOC2 and other security measures. It doesn't target reusability that I as a B would want. The provided blocks never work together. There aren't reusable components.
Tailwind UI or now Tailwind Plus is more like vibe coding pre-AI.
i literally cannot understand why people keep repeating that non tech companies will build their own software, thats not the bear case for saas
This hard part when you're doing in house stuff is getting a good spec, ongoing support, and long term maintenance.
I've gone trough development of a module with a stakeholder, got a whole spec, confirmed it, coded it, launched it, and was then told it didn't work at all like what they needed. It was literally what they told me... I've said 'yes we can make that report, what specific fields do you need' and gotten blank stares.
Even if you're lucky and the original stakeholder and the code are on the same page, as soon as you get a coworkers 'wouldnt it be nice if...' you're going to have a bad day if it's hand coded, vibecoded, or outsourced...
This has always been the problem, it's why no-code never _really_ worked, even if the tech was perfectly functional.
I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.
Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought
Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira
I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically
(this is even granting that AI is a 10x speedup for developers, which I don't agree with and no-one has shown)
This is pretty much what blacksmith.sh does -- GitHub Actions but it's on faster and cheaper hardware. I'm sure they spend non-trivial amounts on marketing but "X but much cheaper" doesn't sound like a difficult sale.
(edit) And the design, sadly, can be as simple as "rip-off bigger competitor" -- of course if one day you are the big competitor because you "won" in the market, you'll need to invest in design, but by then I guess you'll have the money?
2. These anecdotes are about tech startups spend, not your <insert average manufacturing business>. Nor or they grounded in data that says "we interviewed 150 SMB companies and 40% of them have cancelled their SaaS subscriptions and replaced it with vibe coded tools"
3. "Analysts are writing notes titled “No Reasons to Own” software stocks." - there is just one analyst saying this: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-reasons-own-software-stock...
4. Most of these SaaS tech stocks have been trading at all time highs...this smells of "explain something very complex with a simple anecdote"
EDIT: Oh lol, the author has a vibe coding SaaS offering...there ya go.
Also many customers of SaaS have little to zero engineering staff, they are in construction, resturaunts, law offices ect. These takes are so assanine.
then the sell-off is attributed to AI because it is far easier to say to shareholders hey we know our company lost half its value but thats actually a good thing because we need to pivot to AI and we're going to spend all our free cash flow on AI software and our stock should totally be trading at 300x earnings again in a few weeks. if you can last another few months as CEO and the fed cuts rates you'll be able to ride it out
of course, the tide is going out on a few dogs. I don't think adobe will become dominant again
you see the same trend with mass-layoffs being blamed on AI. easy way to sell bad news to the shareholders
in 2026, AI and JE are the two reasons for absolutely everything
When you sell a service, it's opaque, customer don't really care how it is produced. They want things done for them.
AI isn't killing SaaS, it's shifting it to second S.
Customers don't care how the service is implemented, they care about it's quality, availability, price, etc.
Service providers do care about the first S, software makes servicing so much more scalable. You define the service once and then enable it to happen again and again.
Are you sure? Companies still use SharePoint Online, Teams etc.
The F in SharePoint stands for fast
Customers don't care if Sharepoint uses LLM, they just want to share ideas, files, reports, pages, etc. If LLM makes it easier, great! If some other product makes it easier, great!
It's not about the product it's about the results.
That maybe doable in your 10-people startup, Namanyay. Try doing it in a larger organisation with layers upon layers of firewalls, databases, authentication systems and not the least importantly - management. Not to mention the vastly different audience, both in size and interest. Your own experience is not the experience of everyone else.
I guess they mean BI, but for a company of any scale, they aren't paying for a chart, they're paying for a permissions system, query caching, a modeling layer, scheduling, export to excel, etc.
Stand alone BI tools are going to struggle, but not because they can easily be vibe coded. It'll be because data platforms have BI built-in. Snowflake is starting down this direction and we're (https://www.definite.app/) trying to beat them to it.
A given company or enterprise does not have to vibe code all this, they just need to make the 10 features with the SLA they actually care about, directly driven off the systems they care about integrating with. And that new, tight, piece of software ends up being much more fit for purpose with full control of new features given to company deploying it. While this was always the case (buy vs build), AI changes the CapEx/OpEX for the build case.
I'm pretty sure every developer who has dealt with janky workflows in products like Jira has planned out their own version that fits like a glove, "if only I had more time".
AI will be used to do “excel better” more than “replace a managed, compliant, feature-rich-carefully-engineered, service”.
At the same time, I have no idea what the cost of LLMs usage will be in the future. So I'm working to ensure the architecture stays clean and maintainable for humans in case this kind of tooling becomes untenable.
If you are selling SaaS consider that a vibe-coding customer is validating your feature roadmap with their own time and sweat. It's actually a very positive signal because it demonstrates how badly that product is needed. If they could vibe code a "good enough" version of something to get themselves unstuck for a week, you should be able to iterate on those features and build something even better in short order, except deployed securely and professionally.
Everyone's going to talk about how cool their custom vibe-coded CRM is until they get stuck in a failed migration.
Failed/partial/expensive migrations is the name of the game with SaaS as well. Lock-in is the bottom line.
Migrations become much less scary when you truly own your data and can express it in any format you like. SaaS will keep sticking around, especially those that act like white-hat ransomware.
People stopped smoking immediately, and cigarette sales tanked. The cigarette companies laughed (with all the phlegm in their throats and lungs) and sales came back 1-2 weeks later.
I suspect in a few months or a year companies with vibe-coded replacements for SaS products will find they need to go back: But, just like how many less people smoke today than in the past, the writing is clearly on the wall. At some point someone will figure out how to replace SaS with AI; it's just going to take a lot longer than many think.