SaaS is dead; long live SaaS!

Found myself nodding along during this entire article.

The vast majority of people in the software industry today were not in the industry in 2000. They did not experience ordering a floppy disk of software from a classified ad in a computer magazine. Or license codes on CD boxes. Or running a SparcStation server under the receptionists desk because that’s the only machine compatible with the business-critical software she used.

In short, most developers were professionally born into the era of SaaS and have never considered an alternative model. They have not even conceived that software could, or should, be sold in another way.

I'm excited to see what new business models pop up from this approach. Frankly, I am close to no longer needing to pay for a Claude Max plan with the way that open source models are performing on my M3 Max.

That era of building a viable SaaS business in a few months is gone. I mean, it technically still exists today but only in the arbitrage sense that the rest of the world hasn’t yet caught on to how quickly and easily software can be built. It’ll be gone soon, I promise.

If you could previously develop a new app in a few months, I can now build that by the end of the week—if not the end of the day. That’s especially because I don’t need to build any of the trappings of a multi-tenant app destined for the mass market. I can choose HTTP basic auth if it suits me. Or none at all. I might not worry about backups. I can host it alongside other internal apps with barely a glancing-thought towards scalability. I don’t need branding. Or marketing. Or billing. I can reuse internal design systems or let the AI run with whatever comes to its mind first.

The sophistication of the software I’ll produce this way is much lower than what an indie dev might have written 2 years ago. It’s not the same product—mine isn’t even a product—but it’ll solve my problem equally well. I don’t have to build the same amount of software to solve my problem that you do to deliver a solution to everyone’s problems.

You can see most of the software I've vibe coded for myself. I'm sure all of it will be useless garbage for you, but it's been hugely invaluable to me.

And most important of all: vibe coding from my phone has been the most fun I've had building software in decades.