SaaS is Dead.
Everywhere you look — be it HackerNews, Reddit, or LinkedIn — they claim that SaaS is dead. Armed with a laptop and $100 Claude Code subscription, even your tech illiterate uncle can build the next Jira. Producing a working product now costs pennies compared to what it costed before the AI boom. But regardless of what they say, I’m here to tell you that they — are full of shit.
You see, I have been working as a software engineer from 2009. Moreover, I was building products (most of them failed), since high-school, and today I still build and maintain some of them. I have been observing many products, and founders, and I came to a simple conclusion: the people who say that SaaS is dead — never actually built anything themselves.
They never shipped a working product end-to-end. Never had to debug a production issue that costed them real money and customers, as opposed to this cost being absorbed by their employer, while they are, generally, protected against personal liability. They never had to charge customers, issue refunds and maintain their merchant reputation, provide customer support — sometimes to very annoying people, do marketing and advertisement, worry about accounting and compliance, etc.
But more importantly, they were never sitting there, thinking to themselves “what the fuck am I doing with my life”, while wondering will they ever be able to make it? Will they be able to wake up one day, look at themselves in the mirror and say “I am proud of what I have achieved”, rather than thinking that all they have managed to achieve was wasting their precious time on a stupid SaaS idea?
They did none of this. Instead, all they had to do is write a nice article titled “SaaS is Dead”.
Software was never the end-goal. Developers convinced themselves that it is, but it never was. The end goal was to build a product and sell it. Make money. Spin the capitalistic wheel. Or simply build a good product and stop participating in capitalistic society all-together.
Most people are not built for entrepreneurship. They simply are not ready to give up their weekends for a prospect of 5% chance of reaching a sustainable profit from their SaaS. The math is right here, and nobody argues with it: it is better to a get a cushy 9-to-5 in tech with pension and benefits, than to pursue solopreneurship / building a SaaS, while making pennies. Even if you land in the 5%, you will be making sustainable profit, with the keyword being sustainable. Exceptions exist of course, but I doubt that if you have a hard time swallowing 5%, you’d be happy to devour sub 1% chance for being exceptional.
And I don’t blame them. I don’t think they are worse people, or that we don’t need them. On the contrary. It’s unsustainable if everyone is an entrepreneur.
There is an epidemic of “lack of doing”. People don’t want “doing”, they want “learning”. They are afraid to act.
We all know that in order to have a healthy life, we need at least two and a half hours of physical activity per week. And yet, most people spend more time finding the best workout routine. People get obsessed with productivity, spending countless hours optimizing their Notion templates, for the sake of completing a task 1 minute earlier than their peers, once every 3 months. And they do the same with entrepreneurship. Instead of going and building, they keep researching or coming up with excuses like “it is no longer viable to build a SaaS”. Where is all the “10x productivity” that we keep hearing about? Where are all the Jira replacements? I will tell you where.
It’s all there, buried in GitHub repos that people quickly created with the help of AI, but when they realized that this was the easy part, and now their sprint has turned into a life-long marathon, now, now they quit — leaving behind a graveyard of slopware. Because they never had it. They never had a reason to pursue entrepreneurship. They were always comfortable with what they had, instead trying to fill the void with each and every new toy our capitalistic society has produced. Everything else is too hard. There is no manual for it. It comes with a shitload of boring work, that people either grind through or contract, for money, to someone else. You need a strong why if you want to pursue entrepreneurship, and no, money is not a good why. And most people simply don’t have it. And it’s fine.
So no, SaaS is not dead. Your uncle, unless he has an unexplainable desire for entrepreneurship, will probably never ship anything. He might create something, brag about it during your extended family gathering, while everyone else will be in awe. But in one year, when you ask him “Hey Uncle, what’s going on with that business idea you had a year ago?”, he will shrug, look you in the eyes, and say… “What business idea?”.