SaaS is not dead. The kind that is hard to justify buying is. Let me explain… companies pay for SaaS when it wins on at least two of four axes - time, money, capability (team’s), and tokens.
If a tool only saves you an afternoon of coding, that is not enough anymore. Anyone can build the core feature in a day. AI made that part cheap. Dirt cheap.
What AI did not make cheap is the plumbing around the core feature - pipelines, integrations, compliance, uptime, audit trails, and edge cases collected over years of production use.
That plumbing is the actual product. It takes time, energy, and effort to ensure correctness. The dashboard is just the part users see.
The SaaS companies that die are the ones whose entire value is a thin wrapper around a feature a team can clone in a weekend. The ones that survive are the ones where switching costs, integrations, and compliance are the moat, not the UI.
Building the demo was never the hard part. We did it overnight in hackathons, and now we do it in minutes with AI.
Remember, the delta between a demo and production is 1,000 commits.