The Great SaaS Retreat: Will Building Software Still Be Worth It?

I just read ⁠Pieter Levels’ post about cancelling his SaaS subscriptions and building his own tools with AI. I think this is probably the direction SaaS is going. Why pay for so many monthly subscriptions when you can just build your own tools with AI? Another crazy example is ⁠ArtCraft, which aims to recreate Adobe’s creative software, including tools like Photoshop and Illustrator. The story started after the developer got frustrated with Adobe’s subscription model and early termination fees. He then started building his own alternatives using AI, and the speed is just crazy. Of course, making something that looks and works like Photoshop is not the same as replacing the entire Adobe ecosystem, but the fact that one person can even attempt to build so much in less than a year is pretty amazing. For small SaaS products, I think this could be a big problem because people can now build their own tools instead of paying monthly fees. For large B2B software, it will probably take much longer because companies need reliability, security, integrations, and support. But I think the direction is clear.

I’m also thinking about this with my own product, InvenTrac. I would say Phase 1 is pretty much complete, and now I’m trying to figure out marketing, which is always the hardest part for me. Building software has become much easier with AI, but getting people to use it and pay for it is still a different story. And now, if everyone can build software, what makes our products special? Maybe having a good idea and being able to build it will no longer be enough. We need to find real problems, reach the right customers, and give them a reason to keep paying us instead of building something themselves. But this also makes me wonder if it’s still worth spending so much time building SaaS products when the whole business model could be changing.

Pieter also made an interesting point about the subscriptions he still pays for. Many of them are related to content, either consuming content or creating it. That makes sense to me. People will still pay for things they enjoy, like YouTube and Spotify, and tools that help them create something useful. There are also services that are too expensive or difficult to run by yourself. And of course, we still have to pay taxes. LOL. Maybe the future of SaaS is not that software will disappear, but that people will stop paying for so many general-purpose tools and only pay for things they really need. I don’t know how this will turn out, but it’s definitely something to think about as a developer building SaaS products today. Maybe marketing will become even more important than coding. Or maybe I’ll just vibe-code my own marketing tool and solve that problem too.