Simple CRUD app sure, but we're nowhere near being able to vibe code even a relatively low-complexity enterprise SaaS product.
If it's got customer data in it and/or you're making important business decisions based on it, you really need your system to be accurate and secure. My experience is the people who procure enterprise software know this and tend to care a lot about it. They often have legal and contractual obligations around that.
In the 1990s there were people who thought OOP with point and click tools like FoxPro and Delphi would make it so easy to create software that everything could be built in-house without expert programmers. The invention of SQL was supposed to eliminate roles like Report Writer and Data Analyst because now business people could just write their own queries "in English" and get back answers.
And yet, precisely that happened in the end, just not with the tools envisioned. Excel, VBA and, where you had one knowledgeable employee, MS Access makes for incredibly powerful and incredibly hard to maintain "shadow IT" - and made even more difficult when someone sneaked in a password, because that takes a bit of an effort to remove [1], knowledge that is easy for us today to find, but not when I was young.
Also, back in the IE6 era, there was a lot of point-and-click created web interfaces... just that it wasn't HTML5 or even HTML. It was an <object> tag loading some ActiveX written by some intern in VB6, or Java, or Flash. I sort of miss that era but also, it was a damn security nightmare. Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits, but at least it didn't run native code with full user privileges by design. I'm not kidding, theoretically you could go and import/use functions from any system DLL up to and including Kernel32. OLE/OCX, ActiveX... a design way ahead of its time.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/272503/removing-the-pass...
The new tools didn't shrink demand for COTS enterprise software - it grew massively since the 90s!
Wrong take. You don't need to build something better, you only need something good enough that matches what you actually need. Whether you build it or not and ditch the SaaS is more of an economic calculus.
Also, this isn't much about ditching the likes of Jira not even mentioning open source jira clones exists from decades.
This is more of ditching the kind of extremely-expensive-license that traps your own company and raises the price 5/10% every year. Like industrial ERP or CRM products that also require dedicated developers anyway and you spend hundreds of thousands if not millions for them. Very common, e.g. for inventory or warehouse management.
For this kind of software, and more, it makes sense to consider in-housing, especially when building prototypes with a handful of capable developers with AI can let you experiment.
I think that in the next decade the SaaS that will survive will be the evergreen office suite/teams, because you just won't get people out of powerpoint/excel/outlook, and it's cheap enough and products for which the moat is mostly tied to bureaucratic/legal issues (e.g. payrolls) and you just can't keep up with it.
The sheer volume of data, the need for real time consistency in store locations, yada yada means that bad early decisions bite hard down the road.
Lots of drudge work can be assisted by AI, especially if you need to do things like in ingest excel sheets or spit out reports, but I would run far away from anything vibe coded as hard as possible.
One of my clients spends 500k+ on XXX licensing per year (for a 200M revenue company that's not peanuts), and on top of that has to employ 12 full time XXX developers (that command high figures just for their expertise on that software while providing very little productivity) and every single feature takes months to develop anyway. Talking about stuff like adding few fields to a csv output.
So the total cost of XXX is in the 2M/year range, and it keeps ballooning.
My (4 men) team already takes care of the entire warehouse management process except inventory, the only thing that XXX provides, we literally handle everything: picking, manufacturing, packaging, shipping phase and many others.
In any case, nobody has mentioned vibe coding.
I stated that a handful of good engineers with the aid of AI in a couple of months can provide a working prototype to evaluate. In our case it's about extending our software that already does everything, except inventory management.
When you spend 2M/year on a software (1% of your revenue), growing every year by 100/150k it makes sense to experiment building a solution in house.
Spending tons of money to get a janky, unreliable system of record, or finding out too late it is missing crucial auditing capabilities, or that it has Big Money bugs, on the other hand, is far worse, especially if you have investors asking what the hell you were thinking.
Your point about users not knowing what they wanted until after the fact is also painfully true. The hardest part about these systems is the people most likely to buy are the ones who have been doing it with a lot of human processes for years. Buying a SaaS or other third party product means having leverage to force them to change to more standard practices. Building in-house means that everyone will fight to high hell to make sure that their special snowflake way of doing things is accounted for and you end up in a worse spot as a result.
There's multiple people highly involved into maintaining the status quo which do everything to take any responsibility out of them.
I rather use Excel. It's likely More robust and safer than the vibe coded app that could trigger data loss / incorrectness / issues any time.
Most companies are not going to replace stable SaaS with a pile of AI-generated internal tools. They don’t want the maintenance or the risk.
If there’s a real B2B game changer, it’s Microsoft.
The day Excel gets a serious, domain-aware AI that can actually model workflows, clean data, and automate logic properly, half of these “build vs buy” debates disappear. People will just solve problems where they already work.
Excel has always been the real business platform. AI will just double down on that, not kill SaaS.
Best they can do is more adware in windows. Sorry.
Vibe coding might not be supplanting all SaaS solutions but it's definitely shaking out "last-gen" solutions.
A lot of companies have been too smart for that, and a lot of SaaS offerings are too small to be truly entrenched. Arguably the investment horizon is too short (IBM took decades getting to that point).
The only real vendors who managed to become the next IBM are the cloud providers.
- No professional used an iPhone for years. Most don’t today.
- Professional scoffed at it as a toy
- The toy shifted the balance of volume through everyday enablement of amateurs to a degree that professional were right, but now in a severely lopsided terrain.
The value ends up in the most engaged paradigm, rather than the most perfect one.
Are they not able to just engage AI to solve those problems now? E.g. this morning I saw an app that did something interesting to me for $20 a month. 20 minutes in Gemini and I had a functional app that replicated the behavior. SaaS are more complex but give me a small team and a couple months and we could replicate most any of them.
Financial performance e.g. revenue is what counts right now as any hard-evidence.
The other issue is valuations - B2B SaaS stocks have never been rooted in reality, and the 100+ P/E ratios were always going to come down to earth at some point.
Let's put an example an exception-tracking SaaS (Sentry, Rollbar). How do the economics of paying a few hundred bucks per month compare vs. allocating engineering resources to an in-house tracker? Think development time, infra investment, tokens, iteration, uptime, etc. And the opportunity cost of focusing on your original business instead.
One would quickly find out that the domain being replaced is far more complex and data-intensive than estimated.