I got just as many clicks out of LinkedIn as anyone talking about the death of SAAS in the past few years. I think that we need to accept that a company that has a decade or two head start on the software stack and a loyal set of customers and clearly accepted workflows and business practices is not going to go down swinging. Not Figma, though. Sorry Figma. I am waiting for the vultures to pick over your corpse because you do not love me enough as an intermediate customer, and people doing demos and presentations in Figma with all of your swoopy zooming in and out give me seasickness.
Setting aside the Figmaphobia, lots of businesses are sitting down to figure out how to prevent themselves from getting vibed out of business by someone who looked at their price tag to their employer and made something that is almost good enough in a few hours of tapping, typing, talking, and tweaking. The four T’s of vibing, right there.
I would write a book if I thought for a second someone would buy it. My track record on Amazon as an affiliate tells me this is not worth the time.
Anyway, death of SAAS. My thoughts.
In all of the triumphant posts about SASSpocalypse, I do not see many people who have sat down and said: Where is episode five? For those three of you who have not watched the OG Star Wars Trilogy, this is where the SAAS Strikes Back.
Do you really expect all these big companies just to roll over and let in-house vibe-coded “80% solutions” eat their lunch?
So what is the countermove?
I think that it is repricing.
Gone is the day where per user per month pricing is the norm. Because that geometric scale-up of cost over time is not sustainable. No one wants to pay 1300 a month for… checks notes… IRC plus a “doot doot doot” notification.
For those numbers, Slack and Jira, I am just not that into you.
We are going to enter a Great Renegotiation time, where companies paying per month per user are going to have to reprice everything against someone with a cursor subscription holding a gun to their head. And quite frankly, I am also going to join in on this. I threw out the per user per month pricing on a platform product because it is so last decade.
There are magic numbers now where everyone with a subscription project is going to have to figure out licensed user volumes, possibly in realtime, to charge at a non-linear rate.
This is about to become the new normal. People will accept a price increment per thousand users going up marginally, but the heyday where you are getting a bump for every subscription? That day is gone.
