But the longer I use them, the more issues I notice with them through becoming a power-user and start to understand exactly how they work. Then usually before my first months subscription runs out; if I find them useful, I do not renew the subscription, but I spend a weekend with the latest SOTA LLM in Cursor or VCcode to build out the core capabilities for myself, and then never go back to the service. Often, even as a power-user, if some SaaS has 10-20 features, I really only need 5 of them. And then I can add 2-3 more that they wouldn't ever build. The best part is that I do not need to be "production grade", because I am the only user. I don't even need cloud services, except third party APIs, because I just spin up the repo on my localhost, and launch the apps capabilities when I need them. If there is a bug, I fix it right then and there. Security? Who cares. They'd have to access my computer first.
So quite naturally I am wondering, how many other people are doing this, and how this reflects on the whole SaaS landscape. And at the same time, morals and ethics, because I am basically out here stealing ideas from people who build products, and turning them into private apps for myself with no goal of ever monetizing them. Often I am just going back and forth between those products, and copying their features into my own app to avoid needing to pay for them. And it feels like its becoming easier and easier to do this.
For example a self hosted application that provides real time service monitoring with performance metrics and can proxy that information between other data systems versus some full stack app that provides service information from the cloud.
On the other side of the coin I do write my own apps to avoid reliance on media streaming subscriptions.
risk-tolerant early adopters care purely about your features, and are willing to figure out the rest
the bigger orgs (folks that refuse to move off legacy software) won't move until you can answer questionnaires about industry-specific integrations, security/compliance, enterprise-level support/SLAs, training/onboarding, change management, scalability/performance, data governance and management tools
No we aren’t going to sign a 1000 seat license to pay for a dumb AI, VC bait three person company we have never heard of.
On the other hand, even if we could replace a subscription by a vibe coded internal app, if it isn’t part of our core competitive advantage - ie “it won’t make the beer taste better” - we aren’t going to spend the effort to write it or more importantly maintain it.
While each of us have a yearly “tools and training allowance” that we can use for almost anything job related, we can’t use any random SaaS that could touch proprietary data. If it was offline sure.
And that is why AI-generated SaaS apps are hype. Because a reliable SaaS is not easier to build. It is easier to launch a prototype. But building a robust, reliable app that solves a real problem in a way that is worth paying for is a completely different level of effort.