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- Hacker News
- This feels a bit like motivated reasoning to me. This little tool of yours could instead be a seed you build around. Do you have access to a market? Yes? You are in a better position than ten thousand other vibe coders with a similar idea. No? If you have the stamina to pursue a market, you have more stamina than thousands of vibe coders who will just give up.
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.
- Possibly.. I admit I'm quite bad with distribution, hence why I usually work with a few clients long-term.
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...
by Adrig - I kind of get what the article is saying. But I am looking at it from a different perspective.
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.
by whinvik - I expect full circle on this one. Short term - many enthusiasts build stuff. I can fully imagine someone in a given company creating something over the weekend and persuading manager to adopt the system. However, 6 months pass, the person now moved into new role or left a company, nobody knows the product and it becomes just another SaaS just without working support behind it. So for short term it is definitely bring some losses. Long term I think it will bite those who dropped the software. Over-customisation for the needs of everyone is probably here to stay in my opinionby rkuodys
- if it was built with AI then the knowledge of the builder is not really adding much. the next person coming in to fix issues is just going to feed the thing into an AI too, and ask the AI to fix the problem they have.by em-bee
- >> Because AI is crushing small standalone software
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.
by risyachka - Great post except that light grayish blue background is killing my eyes.by chenster
- yeah, strange given that the article is about design systems...by nchmy
- I don't know if it's a coincidence but this is the same thing an AI explained to me when prompted something like "what replaces SaaS now that AI can build most things on demand". That was like a year ago. I have no proof for this, but we might all just be getting similar responses from similar contextual bubbles and landing on the same conclusions.by ef2k
- Some contrudictions in the article. Yes, Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies. Yes, the ai made the easy part easier. So why should the landscape change? Yes, technical people can build tools for themselves. Do they all really want to? What about non-technical people? Also, note - it's tools, not products. Tools help me achieve a specific goal. Products help me work better in a way I've not necessarily thought about myself.
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.
by sashagim - > Todo apps were always cheap to build, but some became large companies
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/
by Adrig - Idk if I disagree completely but it feels like I do. To elaborate, I don’t think we will see less applications, I think we will see more with better features.
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.
by khasan222 - Bad example: uber is not a saas at all
It's a network.
by JackSlateur - From what ive seen we see no more features and quality is getting worse.
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.
by pydry - > Senior interface designer > The website fails accessibility color contrastby soulchild37
- He can design good looking interfaces, just not accessible ones I guess.
I mean the website does look good, it's just hard to read.
by hoppp - Text is WCAG AAA?by Adrig
- > Senior interface designer > if you click on the website, it sends out pixelated ripples over the whole screenby echoangle
- Before the industrial revolution or so somebody coming up in a craft would build a chunk of their toolset as part of that process. Even today many good (not necessarily software) engineers build some of their own tools. AI has made it much easier to build tooling to make your life better. Maybe some could be sold. But that isn't the intent and, as others have noted, can take significant additional effort.
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.
by tahoemph999 - > I built a SaaS in a few hours. It does its job better than tools people pay real money for.
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.
by mattm - > 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.
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.
by willio58 - For businesses that build software (which is more than you'd think, as this includes the entire financial sector), building vs. buying has an entirely new scale.
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.
by preg_match - This is just the old argument in favour of SaaS, though. The article is pointing out that those long-standing rules may no longer make sense, in a world where 1. it no longer takes even a weekend to build the niche, perfectly custom tool and 2. the maintenance / feature requests side is also just a prompt away.
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.
by sandcat_ - > Most of the effort in software goes into understand people other than you and building guardrails for them.
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
by Adrig - This has that weird "AI written" sentence structure.
- We get it. You're one of gods chosen, who alone can recognize ai. Thank you for your beloved beneficence.by halJordan
- It also says a lot of right things in just the right way at just the right time.
If you miss the message, one less person to compete with.
by cadamsdotcom - Fable helped me edit since I'm not a native English speaker, so I might not catch these subtleties. Thought and structure are my ownby Adrig